Prof. Elisabeth Tauber

MFEA co-founder Elisabeth Tauber is associate professor of social anthropology at the Free University of Bolzano.  She studied social anthropology, modern history and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Edinburgh (MA 1995). She did extensive ethnographic fieldwork with a small seminomadic Sinti community in Northern Italy, completing her PhD at the LMU Munich in co-tutelle with the University of Florence in 2005. The writing up of the doctoral thesis was funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and focused on economies of begging, nomadism, marriage and relations with the ancestors (2014 [2006] Du wirst keinen Ehemann nehmen! Lit Verlag). The Fritz Thyssen Foundation funded her Post-Doc research on policies of inclusion at LMU Munich. For many years she advised public institutions and also initiated several projects of applied anthropology with Sinti and refugees. She was teaching faculty member of the PhD summer school program for Romani Studies at the Central European University in Budapest (2007-2014), and she chaired the Scientific Committee of the European Academic Network of Romani Studies (2012-2015) an EC and CoE funded project. Drawing inspiration from the mnemonic practices of the Sinti and post-colonial debates on silenced voices, she has conducted her most recent ethnographic research in Italian state archives (2019 Archive and Ethnography. SI La Ricerca Folklorica). In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in relations with land in high alpine regions. In her current research project, which is funded by the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, she focuses on pastoralism and human-non-human relationship networks.