New Colleagues

Spring 2026

Martí Torra-Merín

Martí Torra-Merín is a visiting PhD candidate in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. His current PhD research focuses on understanding Catalan children's everyday relationship with sexuality, with particular attention to elements of play and playfulness. During his stay in Uppsala, he will be visiting Associate senior lecturer in ethnology Jakob Löfgren to learn about the importance of play in social life. From Löfgren’s understanding of play as something found within a continuum with ritual, Torra-Merín will further his analysis of how children’s engagement with sexuality through play can be understood as a ritualized way of building and maintaining particular types of relationships and social structures.

Maria Frederika Malmström

Maria is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher specializing in contemporary Egypt, with a longstanding focus on Urban Political Anthropology and the Anthropology of the Senses. Her work engages critically with theories of masculinities, sound, affect, and materiality. Maria currently leads the Swedish Research Council–funded project The Militarized Sensorium: State-Sponsored Infrastructure and Affective Politics in Egypt and Tunisia, in collaboration with Adjunct Professor Rosa Sansone.

Carolina Reinhammar

Caroline will be a visiting doctoral student at the department for one year. Since autumn 2023, she is a doctoral student in ethnology at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg, and is affiliated with the interdisciplinary national research school The Future of Democracy: Cultural Analyses of Illiberal Populism in Times of Crises (FUDEM). Caroline's research is based on an understanding of folklore as a socially and politically situated practice, in which social media has come to play a central role. Her thesis project examines, among other things, how epistemic conflicts take shape in digital folklore related to the climate crisis.

Anders Norge Lauridsen

Anders is starting a three-year international postdoc administered by Uppsala University, hosted at Aarhus University, and funded by the Swedish Research Council. He will be part of the research environment at the department and the Forum for Africa Studies.

The postdoctoral project aims to co-write a history of the Sihanaka with the Sihanaka community of Anororo, Madagascar. By bringing together oral traditions, archival research, and ethnography, the project explores how historical knowledge is produced, transmitted, and negotiated, and how such collaborative practices can reclaim the past of a people long marginalised as a “people without history”. The project benefits from scholarly support from colleagues abroad, particularly Professor Takumi Moriyama at the University of Tokyo.