I am a social anthropologist with regional focus on South Asia and Southeast Asia. I have conducted ethnographic research in India and with overseas Indian groups in the UK, US, and the Netherlands, which resulted in the PhD thesis Mobility and the Region (University of Amsterdam 2016) and the monograph New Lives in Anand (University of Washington Press 2022). I have recently started new research in Indonesia.

My new project Cycling Together (funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, 2026-30) is situated in Yogyakarta. It investigates how bicyclists in this city know and mediate the urban environment, and - on a more abstract level - how anthropological ways of knowing can support initiatives that try to make cities more sustainable.

My research is situated in urban anthropology, the anthropology of migration, and media anthropology. As a visual anthropologist, I do not only write about my research but have also made ethnographic films and have contributed to participatory media design. In my daily work at the university, I invest in teaching and research structures that support a “beyond-textual” vision for knowledge production.

I am a tenured associate professor at the University of Vienna, where I serve as vice-head of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and head of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. I am associate editor of the journal Asian Anthropology and co-convener of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). In the past I held positions at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Tübingen, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore (NIAS).