Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius

Christiane Brosius teaches Visual and Media Anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS). Her main research fields are urban transformation in South Asia (mainly Delhi and Kathmandu), cultural heritage, art/ivist production and social relations such as intergenerational exchange in urban habitats. Brosius last monograph is India’s Middle Class. New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (2010 Routledge New Delhi, paperback edition, with additional introduction: 2014). It examines how economic liberalisation impacted Delhi’s transformation and includes case studies on real estate advertising, religious leisure parks, themed weddings, lifestyle specialists and magazines. From 2014-17, she headed a multinational EU-research project entitled “Creating the ‘New’ Asian Woman. Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi” funded by HERA: Humanities in the European Research Area with Melissa Butcher (London) and Jeroen de Kloet (Amsterdam). In 1996, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Yousuf Saeed and Christiane founded Tasveer Ghar/House of Pictures: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture (www.tasveerghar.net) which is partly hosted at Heidelberg (Priya Paul Collection, Visual Pilgrim). In 2019-2020, Ramaswamy, Saeed and Brosius co-edited a set of new visual essays: “Manly Matters” in South Asia, enabled through the Humboldt Foundation’s Annelies Maier Research Award to Sumathi Ramaswamy at HCTS. In completion for 2020 is a fourth monograph on Romantic love, media and urban youth cultures in India. With Prof. Dr. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Brosius founded and is co-speaker of the Shaping Asia Network Initiative. Since 2018, and with Axel Michaels, she directs the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP), which documents endangered urban cultural heritage in the Kathmandu Valley.