Olaf Zenker new at the Kolleg

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg welcomes the social anthropologist Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker as a new fellow in April. Professor Zenker will spend the summer semester at the Kolleg, during which time he will investigate the ongoing process of land restitution in South Africa.

Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the University of Halle and received his Habilitation from the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. Apart from visiting fellowships at the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Cambridge, Harvard and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, he held professorships at the University of Cologne, the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Fribourg. Focusing on Southern Africa, Northern Ireland and Germany, his research has dealt with political and legal issues such as statehood, bureaucracy, the rule of law, normative pluralities, modernity, inequality, justice, conflict and identity formations.

Zenker's research project at the Kolleg is called “Land Restitution and the Moral Modernity of the New South African State”. It deals with the highly juridified renegotiations of modern statehood that are at the core of South African land restitution. The new state simultaneously functions as the main driving force, the judicial arbiter and the core reference point as claims are lodged against the state. The project studies land restitution as an exemplary site, at which the moral modernity of the new South African state is contested, renegotiated and made in and through the law.

Further information on the research project

We wish Professor Zenker a good start in Münster and look forward to working with him.