Rane Willerslev is a Danish anthropologist who is Professor at the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics at the University of Aarhus, in the city of Aarhus, Denmark. He is also the director of the Ethnographic Collections at Moesgård Museum, Denmark.[1][2] In September 2011, he is taking up the directorship of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway.
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Willerslev studied at the University of Manchester where he was awarded a Master of Arts degree in Visual Anthropology in 1996. His 2003 PhD degree was from the University of Cambridge. Willerslev’s main field of research has been hunting and spiritual knowledge of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, amongst whom he lived (along with his twin brother, the evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev). [3]
From 2004 to 2006 Willerslev had been associate professor at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in the Department for Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. In 2006 he was appointed associate professor at the University of Aarhus and in 2010 he was given a full professorship. In September 2011 he begins the job of director of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.
The author of several scientific papers, chapters in books and newspaper articles, including contributions on vision and visiology, animism, phenomenology and other anthropological topics, he has also brought out books: Hunting and Trapping in Siberia, which appeared in 2000; Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, published in 2007, and a popular book På flugt i Sibirien (On the Run in Siberia), published in 2009. Since 2007, Willerslev has been the editor of Acta Borealia: Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies.
In 2006 and 2010, Willerslev was awarded the ‘Young Elite Researcher’s Awards’ by the Independent Research Councils of Denmark. In 2010, Willerslev gave the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at London School of Economics.