Tyler Zoanni

Tyler received a PhD in sociocultural anthropology at New York University in 2019, after earlier studies at Chicago and Harvard. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and before that was a postdoc at the University of Bayreuth. Tyler is finishing a book on disability and religion in Uganda and starting new research on democracy and demography in the African Union. Tyler’s interests broadly include politics, religion, kinship, value, wellbeing, personhood, and aesthetics, while his ethnographic work focuses on both Great Lakes and Indian Ocean Africa. He’s excited to meet and mentor students with a range of commitments, and is thinking in particular about offering seminars on disability, the idea of humanity, biopolitics, Afrofuturism, Indian Ocean worlds, and Asia-Africa connections. Tyler is also a filmmaker, and his first film, The Ladies (Ukrainian with English subtitles) is distributed by DER. He grew up on a farm in rural Montana, is a first-generation university student, and worked in US disability activism before becoming an anthropologist. For more information on Tyler, see http://zoanni.com/