Franz Krause is Professor of Environmental Anthropology at MESH and the University of Cologne’s Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Since 2024, he is Co-Director of MESH. Furthermore, Franz is a founding member of the European Association of Social Anthropology’s Environment and Anthropology Network, and currently deputy chair of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He came to the University of Cologne in 2016 to direct the DELTA Junior Research Group, which explored everyday life in river deltas around the world.
Franz studied anthropology, environmental engineering, economics and environment and development in Berlin (MA 2006), Leiden, Manchester (MSc 2004) and Aberdeen (PhD 2010). His research and teaching revolve around the role of water in society and culture. He works with ethnographic methods, but is also inspired by environmental history, more-than-human geography, phenomenology and science and technology studies. For his first independent research project, he conducted fieldwork with paddy rice farmers who communally managed their irrigation systems in the Philippines. His doctoral research took him to the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, where he explored the relations between the river and the inhabitants of its banks (Krause 2023).
Subsequently, he conducted postdoctoral research on the lower River Severn in Southwest England as part of an interdisciplinary project that investigated the links between flooding, memories and resilience (McEwen et al 2017). His second postdoc focused on life in the Soomaa region in Estonia, where water mattered particularly in terms of flooding, soft ground and wetland restoration. Franz then directed a research group that studied everyday life in river deltas in four world regions, juxtaposing an ethnographic perspective to the bird’s-eye view of satellite images and large datasets (Krause and Harris 2021). Within the group, Franz worked with Inuvialuit and Ehdiitat Gwich’in inhabitants of the Mackenzie Delta in Arctic Canada.
Currently, Franz is developing a research project that investigates global water crises – such as droughts, floods, pollution and thaw – from a perspective of groups of people for whom these crises do not figure as ruptures in a previously harmonious world, but as renewed waves of destruction in the context of long colonial histories of displacement and catastrophes.
New Publication:
Krause, Franz. 2023. “Climate Change as Colonial Echo in the Canadian Arctic.” In /Anthropology and Climate Change: From Transformations to Worldmaking/, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, 3rd ed., 170–80. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003242499-14.
Contact: f.krause[at]uni-koeln.de
Office: Weyertal 59, Wienand building, 4th/top floor, room 4.4