Team > Prof. Dr. Melina C. Kalfelis

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social and Cultural Anthropology

Scientific Career:

• since Mai 2023: Juniorprofessor for Social and Cultural Anthropology with a Focus on Social Belonging – University of Bayreuth
• 2022-2023: Postdoc in the research initiative „ConTrust: Trust in Conflict“ – Goethe-University Frankfurt
  
• 2021-2022: Research Associate (postdoc) of Prof. Dr. Andrea Behrends at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology – University of Bayreuth
  
• 2020: Visiting Fellow at „Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa“ – University of Legon (5 months)
  
• 2020: Visiting Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence „Africa Multiple” –  University of Bayreuth (6 months)
  
• 2019: VolkswagenStiftung Visiting Fellow at the Institute for African Affairs – German Institute of Global and Area Studies Hamburg (7 months)
  
• 2015-2018: Collaborative Research Center 1095 “Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes”
  
• 2014-2015: Doctoral Scholarship at the „International Graduate Center for the Study of Cultures“ (GCSC) – Justus-Liebig-University Gießen
  

Education:

• 2019: PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Topic: NGO als Lebenswelt. Transnationale Verflechtungen im Arbeitsalltag von Entwicklungsakteuren" (Campus, 2020) – Justus-Liebig-University Gießen / Goethe-University Frankfurt
• 2013: Magister Artium (excellent) in Historical Anthropology, Political Science and Psychoanalysis – Goethe-University Frankfurt
  

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social and Cultural Anthropology

Research interests

• Political and philosophical anthropology
  
• Ethnographies of violence
• Conflict, vigilantism, crime & criminalization
• Ordinary ethics and trust
• Civil society and transnational NGO work
• Media and visual anthropology
• Critical phenomenology
• West Africa and Western Europe

Melina C. Kalfelis is a Junior Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology with a Focus on Social Belonging at the University of Bayreuth. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in West Africa and Western Europe, she specialises in political anthropology, concentrating specifically on vigilantism, violence, and resistance, as well as North-South relations in transnational architectures of security and development. She is the author of NGO als Lebenswelt [NGOs as Lifeworlds (Campus, 2020) and co-editor of NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa (Berghahn, 2021) and Afrotopia (Utopian Studies, forthcoming in 2025). Her journal articles have been published with Conflict&Society, Journal of Intervention and State Building, and Anthropologie&Développement. She also brings expertise in visual anthropology, with particular emphasis on photography and film as means of ethnographic inquiry.

More information on https://mkalfelis.wordpress.com/.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social and Cultural Anthropology

Publications

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social and Cultural Anthropology

Prof. Dr. Melina C. Kalfelis
Juniorprofessor of Social and Cultural Anthropology with a Focus on Social Belonging /

University of Bayreuth
Building: GW II
Room: 00.17
Universitätsstraße 30
​D-95447 Bayreuth

Phone: +49 (0)921 / 55-4133

E-mail: melina.kalfelis@uni-bayreuth.de

Social and Cultural Anthropology | University of Bayreuth