Rane Willerslev (5 July 1971) holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (2003) and a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester (1996). From 2004-6, he was Lecturer at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. In 2010, he was appointed Full Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. Willerslev possesses extensive leadership experience: from 2008-11, he was the Head of The Ethnographic Collections at Moesgaard Museum; from 2011-13, he was the Director of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. From 2013-17, he was the Interdisciplinary Research Coordinator at Aarhus University’s Arctic Research Centre. He was also the leader of the Center for Audio-Visual Universes, a collaboration between Aarhus University and Filmby Aarhus. From 2010-2016, he led the Sapere Aude research project: ‘Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time’; and from 2018-2021, the Frihumsam research project ‘Sacrifice and Value: The Limits of Sacred Violence’. On the 1 July 2017, Willerslev was appointed the General Director of the National Museum of Denmark by Minister of Culture.
Willerslev’s research is award-winning, international and interdisciplinary in scope. Twice (2006 and 2010), he has been awarded the ‘Elite Researcher’s Award’ by the Danish Council for Independent Research and he has given the prestigious ‘Malinowski Memorial Lecture’ at LSE in 2010. In 2013, he received a Jens Christian Skou Fellowship at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. In 2015, he was made Honorary Professor at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo and in 2017, he received the Carlsberg Foundation’s Semper Ardens-stipendium. Willerslev is the author and coauthor of 67 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, three academic monographs, and he has coedited nine anthologies and journal themed issues. Since 2007, he has been the coeditor of Acta Borealia: Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies and member of several other editorial boards, including the Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute. In addition, he is coeditor of three book series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment (Berghahn Books) and Studies in Death, Materiality and Time, as well as Culture, Environment and Adaptation in the North (both with Routledge).
Willerslev’s main field of research has been among Siberia’s indigenous peoples (Yukaghirs and Chukchi) in a comparative circumpolar perspective, and he has also conducted fieldworks among the Ik, a hunting and subsistence agriculturalist population in northern Uganda.