Tatjana Thelen

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Tatjana Thelen is a Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna's Faculty of Social Sciences. She holds leadership roles, including Deputy Director of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences (ViDSS) and Vice Spokesperson of the Research Platform 'Transformations and Eastern Europe'. Her research focuses on kinship, state boundaries, care practices, and post-socialist societies. She has conducted fieldwork in Eastern Europe and Germany, exploring topics like property relations, state legitimacy, and social security. Notable awards include the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford (2023) and fellowships at the IAS Paris and Bielefeld University's ZiF. She leads interdisciplinary projects on state-kinship intersections and directs initiatives like CAST (Care & State Research Network) and Ethnolabs. Recent publications include Stategraphy (2017) and contributions to Politics and Kinship (2021). Her work bridges ethnography with political theory, emphasizing relational approaches to state analysis.

• Education: PhD in Social Anthropology from Free University of Berlin (2002), studies at Universities of Bonn, Cologne, and Berlin.
• Research Projects: Topics include state boundary-making, elder care in Serbia, and electricity access in Pakistan. Supervised PhDs on care in prisons, kinship dissolution in Tanzania, and multicultural elderly care in Vienna/Amsterdam.
• Awards: Volkswagen Foundation grants, Fellowships at IAS Paris and ZiF Bielefeld.