Prof. Dr. Ursula Münster

Ursula Münster is a social anthropologist working on topics concerning South Asia with interests in political ecology, multispecies ethnography, human-animal relations, science and technology studies, extinction, wildlife conservation, the Anthropocene, environmental justice, gender, and environmental movements. She has studied in Munich, Germany, and Mexico City, Mexico (Escuela National de Anthropología e Historia), and has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural South India (Tamil Nadu and Kerala). Since receiving a PhD in anthropology from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2006, Ursula has been a visiting scholar at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) in Bangalore, India, at the Center for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, India, and at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at the University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, USA. She was a postdoctoral researcher (Habilitandin) in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at LMU, working on a monograph on human-elephant relations in South Indian wildlife conservation.

She has been affiliated with the RCC since 2010, both as a research fellow and as a visiting fellow. In August 2015 Ursula joined the RCC as academic coordinator of the Environmental Studies Certificate Program, where she was responsible for developing and coordinating the program's curriculum and for teaching courses on Environment and Society. In 2018, she additionally took over the role of coordinator for the Doctoral Program Environment and Society. As of 2019, she is an associate professor of environmental humanties at the University of Olso, and the director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanties.

RCC Research Project: Elephant Encounters: Living With Wildlife in Times of Extinction