Prof. Dr. Michaela Schäuble

Michaela Schäuble is professor for social anthropology with a focus on media anthropology. She is also founding co-director of EMB-Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern, a creative space that invites students and staff to experiment with audiovisual media and to employ non-text-based forms of knowledge generation and knowledge transfer for teaching and research.

Schäuble is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose research explores apparatuses of belief, specifically the role of embodiment and the senses, mediality and remediation in contexts of religious practice and experience. In recent years a central focus of her work has been on ecological perception and the question of what it means to deal with regimes of in/visibility and the marginalization of subaltern voices, grounded in fieldwork in Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Her interest in iconographies of ecstasy and affliction has mainly evolved around the study of tarantism, a spider possession cult endemic to Southern Italy.

Before joining the University of Bern, Schäuble was lecturer at the University of Manchester and research and teaching fellow at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, a EURIAS Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Bologna, a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, a Baden-Württemberg Exchange Fellowship at Yale University as well as a Paul-Lazarsfeld Visiting Professorship at the University of Vienna.

Schäuble has published articles in Visual Anthropology,  Visual Anthropology Review, Nationalities Papers and History & Memory, amongst others, and has edited a special issue on Mining Imagination: Ethnographic Approaches Beyond the Written Word in Anthrovision  and is also co-editor of Rethinking the Mediterranean: Extending the Anthropological Laboratory Across Nested Mediterranean Zones (ZfE/JSCA, 2021).

Her monograph Narrating Victimhood. Gender, Religion, and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia (Berghahn, 2014/2017) provides a unique account of the politics of ambiguous Europeanness from the perspective of those living at Europe’s margins. Examining phenomena such as Marian apparitions, militarized notions of masculinity, the symbolic re-signification of a massacre site, and the desolate social situation of Croatian war veterans, Narrating Victimhood traces the complex mechanisms of political radicalisation in a post-war scenario. This book provides a new perspective for understanding the ongoing processes of transformation in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans.

Her first book Wiedergänger, Grenzgänger, Doppelgänger: Rites de Passage in Bram Stokers Dracula (LIT Verlag, 2006) is a literary analysis of the technology of monsters with an ethnographic twist. Drawing on feminist, queer and psychoanalytical approaches to the monstrous body, and deploying poststructuralist as well as postcolonial criticism, the book unpacks prevailing sexual anxieties and cultural fears of the late nineteenth century that are still ongoing.

In the field of artistic research and experimental ethnography Schäuble co-edited the anthology Studies in the Arts - Neue Perspektive auf Forschung über, in und durch Kunst und Design (transcript, 2021) with Thomas Gartmann. She is currently working on “Miseria und Grazia. Briefe einer Tarantelbesessenen” (under contract with Matthes & Seitz Berlin). In this book she develops the concept of an “epistolary ethnography” and, jointly with Anja Dreschke and Ulrich van Loyen, makes letters written by a subaltern woman to a female anthropologist in post-war Italy accessible to a German-speaking audience for the very first time.

As a researcher, supervisor, and teacher Schäuble works across the fields of ecological and digital humanities, (post)colonialism and cultural heritage, and experimental ethnography. At present, she is Principal Investigator (PI) of two projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Big Data Lives. Anthropological Perspectives on Tech-Imaginaries and Human Transformation (SNSF Project 184862) engages with technologically mediated practices of control and care, and explores how futures are being imagined (otherwise) in relation to data-driven practices that are shaping our lives and the worlds we inhabit. Mediating the Ecological Imperative: Formats and Modes of Engagement (SNSF Sinergia Project 193842) is a joint research project of the Institutes of Art History (Prof. Dr. Peter Schneemann), North American Literature and Culture (Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl) and Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. Research focuses on the visual politics of climate change, the role of ecological issues in art and literature, and social engagement with the environment in indigenous communities.

Her projects «Tarantism Revisited. A collaborative crossmedia project on performance, cultural heritage and popular religion» (SNF Agora) and «Religious Rituals as Coping Strategies for Conflicts» (IFK Religious Conflicts and Coping Strategies, co-convened with Prof. Dr. David Plüss) have recently been completed.

As a documentary filmmaker Schäuble’s work operates at the intersection of experimental essayistic film formats and ethnographic research. She has screened her films and installations at multiple film festivals including the HotDocs Filmfestival in Toronto (Nomination for Best Mid-Length Documentary), Duisburger Filmwoche, Worldfilm Festival of Visual Culture in Tartu, GIEFF, and other venues such as Grassi Museum, Schwules Museum Berlin, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. 

Her feature-length essayistic documentary film Tarantism Revisited (CH/D 2024, 100 min.), co-authored with Anja Dreschke, premiered at the DokLeipzig, International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. 

Schäuble regularly curates film programmes for festivals and exhibition spaces and facilitates interventions with filmmakers and artists. She is one of the network convenors of VANEASA, the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropology.

She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Tübingen University, an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Halle-Wittenberg in conjunction with a European Doctorate (ED) in the Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean issued by Università Ca'Foscari Venezia.

Research and Teaching Interests

media anthropology, visual ethnography, artistic research, religion and ecstatic cults, multispecies ethnography, reenactment and performance, borders & memory politics, archives & cultural heritage; post-socialism, the Mediterranean.