I am an economic anthropologist working for the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo (UiO). At the UvA, I lead a 5-year research project called “Time to pay up? Reparations and global development challenges (REPAIR).” Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the project studies the increasingly diverse global reparations movement.

At the UiO I am involved a project that studies public-private cooperation in pandemic preparedness (PANPREP), and in a project that studies Scandinavain Covid-19 vaccine diplomacy (SCANVAX).

Lastly, I feel passionately about open-access knowledge, which is why I founded the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology (OEA) and its publishing house Verlag Offenes Wissen (Open Knowledge Press).

I occasionally work as development consultant on global health financing and research methods, and have advised the The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (2024), The Paris Peace Forum (2022), the Expert Working Group on Global Public Investment (2021), the German Ethics Council on Global Vaccine Equity (2021), the Minister of International Development for Norway (2021), the Open Society Foundation (2019 and 2021), WHO Africa and the UK government (2020, via the work of Prof. Mark Woolhouse), Caris Foundation in Haiti (2019), Doctors without Borders (2019) among others.

Research expertise

• Economic anthropology
• Global health governance
• Development finance

Research methods

• Qualitative and quantitative research

Current research methods

REPAIR studies new calls for reparations that address global development challenges. It compares reparations for infectious disease outbreaks, climate change, and toxic environments. Find out more at www.reparationsresearch.eu.

PANPREP studies the rise of Public-Private Partnerships in global health, while SCANVAX analyses how and on what bases Scandinavian countries collaborated during the COVID-19 crisis.

Research grants and honours

I have in the past obtained funding from the ERC (REPAIR 101115769), the NordForsk research council, the US Wenner-Gren Foundation (twice), the UK’s Economic  and Social Research Council, Germany’s Heinrich Boell Foundation and Germany’s Academic Merit Foundation. 

My work has been nominated for the Chr. Michelsen prize for outstanding development research, and won the following awards:

• the Usher Institute Recognition Award, “For Excellence in External Engagement and creating a respectful, inclusive working environment” (2019) 
• the LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology/Bloomsbury First Book Competition for “Work Sleep Repeat: The abstract labour of German Management Consultants” (2016)
• the Best Graduate Essay in Political and Legal Anthropology award by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (2015)

My work has been cited and summarized in the following media outlets: Harper’s Magazine (2022), Nature (2021), Morgenbladet (2021 & 2023), The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2021), The Lancet (2021), Wiener Zeitung (2020 & 2021), The British Medical Journal (BMJ) (2021), Bloomberg (2020), Associated Press (2020), Finance and Commerce (2020), Independent Australia (2020), Insurance Journal (2020), Klassekampen (2020), La Tribune (2020), World Finance (2020), BBC Radio4 (2019), Vox (2019).

Current cooperation

• Founder and Managing Director of Open Knowledge Press (Verlag Offenes Wissen)
• Founder and Style Editor of the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology (previously the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology), a peer reviewed open-access encyclopedia for anthropology that has published over 100 entries and has been read by over half a million people

Teaching

Co-teaching in the MAS (Medical Anthropology and Sociology MSc) from 2024, the course “Contemporary Topics in Medical Anthropology and Sociology” 

PhD Supervision

I am happy to supervise work that deals with economic anthropology, global health governance and development finance.