Tyler Zoanni

Tyler Zoanni holds a tenure-track-professorship "Transcultural Processes" at the University of Bremen. His research focuses on politics, health, religion, kinship, aesthetics, personhood, and subjectivity, grounded in fieldwork in East/Central and Indian Ocean Africa. Tyler grew up on a farm in Montana, and studied in Chicago, Cambridge (Mass), and New York. His work appears in edited collections in Cambridge Anthropology and Somatosphere and other articles in Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Ethos, Current History, and Anthropological Quarterly. Tyler’s first film, The Ladies (Ukrainian with English subtitles), is distributed by DER. For more information on Tyler, see http://zoanni.com/

Tyler received a PhD in sociocultural anthropology at New York University in 2019, after earlier studies at Chicago and Harvard. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and before that was a postdoc at the University of Bayreuth. Tyler is finishing a book on disability and religion in Uganda and starting new research on democracy and demography in the African Union. Tyler’s interests broadly include politics, religion, kinship, value, wellbeing, personhood, and aesthetics, while his ethnographic work focuses on both Great Lakes and Indian Ocean Africa. He’s excited to meet and mentor students with a range of commitments, and is thinking in particular about offering seminars on disability, the idea of humanity, biopolitics, Afrofuturism, Indian Ocean worlds, and Asia-Africa connections. Tyler is also a filmmaker, and his first film, The Ladies (Ukrainian with English subtitles) is distributed by DER. He grew up on a farm in rural Montana, is a first-generation university student, and worked in US disability activism before becoming an anthropologist. For more information on Tyler, see http://zoanni.com/