Photo: Luděk Brož
Maike Melles is an environmental anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher based at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czechia. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology (summa cum laude) from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2023.
Between 2017 and 2021, Maike was employed at the Frobenius Institute as a doctoral researcher of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1070 “ResourceCultures” (Tübingen University), funded by the German Research Council (DFG). Prior to her PhD, she obtained an MA in Peace and Conflict Research at Goethe University Frankfurt and Technical University Darmstadt (2017) that followed her BA studies in German language and literature, Anthropology, Political Science and Economics at the Universities of Münster and Warsaw (2009-2015).
Maike taught International Relations at the University of Münster and Anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt.
As a member of an international and interdisciplinary SFB project co-led by Roland Hardenberg, Maike has conducted long-term fieldwork in rural Spain that informs her research on the dehesa woodland pastures. She has explored cultural practices and perceptions associated with present and past landscapes, as well as the dehesa’s socio-ecological and moral-economic transformations. Her current research and ethnographic engagement in the Netherlands on sustainable resource use are inspired by environmental anthropology, discard studies, and the anthropology of wellbeing. Maike is interested in the intersecting temporalities of more-than-human environments and landscapes shaped by commemorative, regenerative and transformative practices.
Selected publications
2023 “Rooting Pigs in a Plural Landscape: Human and Porcine Place-making in the Spanish Dehesa.” Etnofoor 35 (2): 85-100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27275338
2023 (with Jeanine Dağyeli) “From Original Evidence to Ordinary Epistemes: Authenticating the Knowledge We Live by.” Boasblog Contested Knowledge. https://boasblogs.org/contestedknowledge/from-original-evidence-to-ordinary-epistemes/
2023 “Making and Growing: The Lives and Deaths of a Tree and a House in the Spanish Dehesa.” In Porr, Martin and Niels Weidtmann (eds.) One World Anthropology and Beyond. A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold, 156-170. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003162773-17
2022 (with Martin Bartelheim, María Antonia Carmona Ruiz, Döbereiner Chala Aldana, Marta Díaz-Zorita Bonilla, Jesús García Díaz and Roland Hardenberg) “Landscape Use and Transhumance in Sierra Morena through the Ages.” In Bartelheim, Martin, Francisco Contreras Cortés and Roland Hardenberg (eds.) Landscapes as Resource Assemblages in the Bronze Age of Southern Spain. RessourcenKulturen 17. Tübingen: Tübingen University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-66226
2021 “The Representation of the Dehesa Landscape in Spanish Local Museums.” In Bartelheim, Martin, Leonardo García Sanjuán and Roland Hardenberg (eds.): Human-made Environments – The Development of Landscapes as Resource Assemblages. RessourcenKulturen 15. Tübingen: Tübingen University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-60477
