About

I am an economic anthropologist working for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. I have a special interest in global health governance and development finance.

I currently lead a 5 year research project called “Time to pay up? Reparations and global development challenges (REPAIR).” Funded by the European Research Council, the project studies the increasingly diverse global reparations movement, comparing reparations claims made over climate change, pandemic outbreaks, and toxic work environments. I also contribute to a project on ‘Strategic solidarity: Scandinavian countries' COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy (SCANVAX)’, funded by the Nordic Research Council. Lastly, I serve on the board of ‘Pandemic Funds, Public Goods for Health, and the Future of Global Health Financing’ funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

My scientific work has appeared in academic outlets including the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), The British Medical Journal, Critique of Anthropology and BMJ Global Health. It has won the 2015 APLA student paper prize, the LSE Monographs Bloomsbury First Book Competition, was nominated for the Chr. Michelsen prize for outstanding development research, and has been recommended by the Bretton Woods Project. It has also been picked up by popular media, including the Associated Press, BBC Radio 4, Bloomberg Nature, Harper’s Magazine, The Lancet and VOX.

I occasionally work as development consultant on global health financing and research methods. In fact, I published book with Bloomsbury about consulting, entitled Work, sleep, repeat - the abstract labour of German management consultants, and I have advised the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Caris Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, the German National Ethics Council, the Open Society Foundation, the Paris Peace Forum, and WHO Africa among others.

I am the founder of the open access Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology (OEA) and its publishing house Verlag Offenes Wissen (Open Knowledge Press). The encyclopedia has been read by over 700k people from around the world. A third of its readers are based in low and lower-middle income countries.

I have served as a reviewer for American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, The BMJ (British Medical Journal), BMJ Global Health, Development and Change, Economic Anthropology, Focaal, Hau Books, Hau Journal, Global Public Health, New Political Economy, Social Science & Medicine, the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Research in Economic Anthropology.

Previously, I have worked at the University of Cambridge (as Affiliated Lecturer at the Anthropology Department), at the University of Edinburgh (as Senior Research Fellow of Global Health at the TIBA research programme and as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Usher Institute), and at the State University of Haiti (Affiliated Lecturer on Economic Anthropology).

My work has been financed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the German National Merit Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the Wenner-Grenn Foundation, the Nordic Research Council NordForsk, the Research Council of Norway, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the European Research Council.