Profile
Till Mostowlansky NEW

Till MOSTOWLANSKY

Research Professor, ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY
FACULTY ASSOCIATE, ALBERT HIRSCHMAN CENTRE ON DEMOCRACY
Spoken languages
German, English, Russian, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Persian, French
Areas of expertise
  • Aid, humanitarianism and charity
  • Religion and politics
  • Infrastructure and mobility
Geographical Region of Expertise
  • Central Asia
  • Eurasia
  • South Asia

Profile

PhD, University of Bern (2013)

Till Mostowlansky is a Research Professor and Eccellenza Professorial Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at The Graduate Institute Geneva. Before joining The Graduate Institute in 2018 he lectured at the University of Bern and The University of Hong Kong, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong. Till currently leads the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Quiet Aid: Service and Salvation in the Balkans-to-Bengal-Complex” on the nexus between Islam, service and global regimes of aid. He is the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and co-editor of Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022).

To learn more about Till’s research visit mostowlansky.com and follow him at academia.edu
 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS


Books

  • Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (co-editor with Max Hirsh). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2022.
  • Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

Articles

  • “Exemplary Lovers: Humanity and Hierarchy in Muslim Philanthropy.” Public Anthropologist 4, 1–20, 2022.  
  • “Humanitarian Affect: Islam, Aid and Emotional Impulse in Northern Pakistan.” History and Anthropology 31(2), 236–256, 2020.
  • “Emic and Etic.” In: Felix Stein et al. (ed.). Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (with Andrea Rota), 2020.
  • “Managing Karbala: Genealogies of Shia Humanitarianism in Pakistan, England and Iraq.” In: Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain and Michael Feener (eds.). Political Theologies and Development in Asia: Transcendence, Sacrifice and Aspiration. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 55–67, 2020.
  • “Faraway Siblings So Close: Ephemeral Conviviality across the Wakhan Divide.” Modern Asian Studies 53(3), 943–977, 2019.