Birgit Englert

Background

About Birgit Englert

I studied African Studies at the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna and as Erasmus student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. My Magister thesis focused on the history of land politics in Zimbabwe while my doctoral dissertation was an empirical study on land tenure security in the Uluguru Mountains, Tanzania (2005). From 2001 to 2005 I held a position as post-graduate researcher and lecturer at the Department of African Studies, University of Vienna and following positive evaluation in 2005, I got employed as postdoctoral researcher and lecturer until January 2011. In 2009/2010 an Erwin-Schrödinger Grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) enabled me to work as post-doctoral researcher at the l’Université Michel de Montaigne (Bordeaux France. In June and July 2010 I was based in Halifax, Canada, working as guest lecturer and researcher at Dalhousie University financed by the Erasmus Mundus Global Studies programme. In September 2011 I started on a tenure track post-doc position in African History and Society at the Department of African Studies, University of Vienna; in June 2013 I became Assistant Professor and in May 2019 Associate Professor. Within this period I was on maternity leave and parental part-time. In the years 2011-13 and again since 2018, I served as Deputy Study Director (SPL 14) with responsibility for African Studies. In 2016-18 I was acting as Deputy Head of Department and from 2016-2021 as Deputy Head of the interfaculty Research Platform "Mobile Cultures and Societies" at the University of Vienna. Except for the periods when I was away from Vienna, I have been coordinating the editorial team of the journal “Stichproben. Vienna Journal of African Studies” since its foundation in 2001.