New Colleagues

January 2026

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.

November 2025

Dr. Johana Kunin, FORMAS Fellow

I hold a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France, and EIDAES/UNSAM, Argentina. My research focuses on the social dynamics of GM crops and pesticide use in Argentina. At Uppsala University, I will be working with the FORMAS funded project Prosperity, Plants, and Poison: Tracing Toxic Ambivalences in Rural Argentina, together with professor Pablo Lapegna at the University of Georgia, US. This project examines the opportunities and risks associated with GM crops in Argentina. It specifically focuses on how farmers reconcile the economic benefits afforded by their use of herbicides in genetically engineered crops and the claims about the negative environmental impacts and health risks of pesticides. The study also explores human and non-human entanglements—soils, weeds, pests, seeds, chemicals, and climates—to understand social and ecological dynamics in agro-industrial landscapes.