Dr. Thorsten Gieser

Thorsten Gieser is Lecturer in Anthropology at the Institute of Cultural Studies, University of Koblenz, Germany, and Research Associate at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. Previously, he studied Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg (1998-2004) and completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK (2004-2009). As a sensory anthropologist with a focus on human-environment and human-animal relations, his research explores the role of embodied experiences of landscape and human-animal interactions in hunting practices (see his edited book Chasing Wild Pigs, Helsinki University Press, forthcoming) and the role of affects, feelings and atmospheres in human-wolf conflicts in contemporary Germany (see his monograph Leben mit Wölfen, Transcript 2023). He is interested in the mediation of sensory experience and has experimented with evocative ‘thick descriptions/depictions’ in various media. His field website Hunter-Anthropologist.de presents sensory written essays, notes and images from a multi-sensory art installation, photographs and his two films The Beauty of Hunting (2016, 10 min) and The Beauty of Hunting Revisited (2016, 40 min).