I am a social anthropologist trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. In April 2021 I was appointed as Assistant Professor of Political Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. My working languages are English, Swahili and German.
My research is located at the intersection of questions concerning violence, gender, and justice in Eastern African (Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya) and the Arabian Peninsula (Oman). I engage theory from across the fields of political, legal, feminist, public, and linguistic anthropology, visual and arts-based ethnography, and Indian Ocean Studies.
Academic Training
2017 | PhD, Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, London
2013 | MARes/MPhil, Social Anthropology/Anthropological Research Methods, SOAS, London
2012 | Magistra Artium, Education/African Linguistics (Swahili)/Cultural Anthropology, Goethe University, Frankfurt
Academic Appointments
2021 - | Assistant Professor of Political Anthropology, JGU Mainz
2020 | Visiting Research Fellow, Oman Research Grant, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin
2021-2017 | Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Research Center Normative Orders, Goethe University Frankfurt
BIOGRAPHY
Franziska Fay is Assistant Professor of Political Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology and African Studies (ifeas) at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (JGU), Germany. Her research is located at the intersection of questions concerning violence, gender, and justice in Eastern African (Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya) and the Arabian Peninsula (Oman), where she has been conducting fieldwork for the last fifteen years.
In her current second book project, Fay explores local formations of feminist praxis and gender-based colonial violence in Tanzania. Here she works with the German colonial records in the Tanzania National Archive in Dar es Salaam to explore the interplay of sexual violence, witnessing, and social justice in the context of the (post)colonial relationship between Tanzania and Germany.
Her first book “Disputing Discipline: Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools” was published with Rutgers University Press in 2021. It is based on her PhD research at SOAS, London, in the course of which she conducted 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2024/15) in Zanzibar/Tanzania that engaged with constructions of childhood and protection in contexts of international development.
During her postdoc phase at the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt and ZMO Berlin, she expanded her research focus to include questions of belonging, gender, and language in Swahili-speaking diasporic communities in Oman and the wider Indian Ocean area.
Fay’s research has been generously funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA). She serves as Book Review Editor for Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, Duke University Press, Editorial Board Member for Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung (Rüdiger Köppe Verlag), Board Member, The Mouth: Critical Studies the on Language, Culture and Society, and is the Rwanda partnership coordinator at JGU Mainz.
At the ifeas Fay teaches, among other things, Political Anthropology, African Feminisms, Anthropology and Development, Decolonizing Anthropology, Writing Ethnography, Ethnography of East Africa, and Contemporary Theory in Anthropology.
Fay is the winner of the 2025 Sibylle Kalkhof-Rose University Award in the humanities and social sciences.
She lives in Offenbach am Main, where she was raised, graduated from High School in Austin, Texas, and spent her academically formative years in London, UK.