Yasmine Musharbash

Yasmine Musharbash is an Associate Professor in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), part of the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS). She previously served as Head of the ANU Department of Anthropology (2020–2023) and held positions including Senior Lecturer (2019–2023) at ANU, and a Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney (2009–2019). Her research focuses on anthropology of the everyday, settler-colonial studies, monster anthropology, and Warlpiri studies in Central Australia.

Education includes a PhD in Anthropology from ANU (2003), an MA in Social Anthropology and English from Freie Universität Berlin (1997), and extensive exchange studies in Australia and Europe. She has held postdoctoral roles at the University of Western Australia (2004–2008) and the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (2009).

Key research interests include Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, human-other-than-human relations, anthropology of death, and sleep. Her work explores how monsters and monstrous imagery reflect social transformations in settler-colonial contexts. Musharbash has published widely on Warlpiri communities, focusing on daily life, emotions, and cultural resilience.

Her recent articles analyze legal violence against Indigenous Australians, ethnographic fiction, and the symbolism of monsters in cross-cultural contexts. She co-edited Living with Monsters (2023), exploring real and fictional monsters through ethnography.

Awards include the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Musharbash supervises research students and has contributed to projects on Indigenous families and welfare systems in Yuendumu. She engages with broader themes of boredom, embodiment, and spatial practices in anthropology.