Personal website:
David Henig joined the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University as Associate Professor in 2018. Before coming to Utrecht, David taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the University of Kent in Canterbury. He studied anthropology at Durham University under the auspices of the Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
He was also an affiliated researcher with the University of Sussex's Asia Research Centre, and a research associate at Charles University in Prague. David held an affiliation with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and visiting fellowships at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, and at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. In 2020, he was selected by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation as one of their Distinguished Scholars.
Since 2015, David Henig has served as Editor-in-Chief for the journal , and as a member of the editorial boards of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2018 - present), and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2024 - present).
David Henig is an anthropologist with an eclectic range of interests ranging from waste-picking ravens, Islamic dreams and pilgrimage, agnotology, to floods, landmines, and Sherlock Holmes, to name a few. The main thread running through all of his work explores what makes life possible in the wake of dramatic societal and ecological upheavals. His current work is focused on the social, political, cultural, and environmental aftermaths of wars, and probing the new forms of planetary thought that are attentive and responsive to the age of unprecedented anthropogenic transformation, in particular in the context of war ecologies.
Currently, David is working on two larger writing projects. First, he is developing new conceptual and theoretical approaches to the study of explosive war remnants and war ecologies, drawing also on archaeology, forensic science, STS, biosemiotics, and Earth Sciences. Second, with his colleague Prof Rebecca Bryant, he is working on a book manuscript (under contract with Cambridge University Press) on anthropology and geopolitics.
David has previously published widely on lived religion with a regional focus on former Yugoslavia, postsocialist Eastern Europe, and West Asia, and on the themes of economic anthropology, the anthropology of ethics, and the anthropology of time. This includes his monograph, , published by University of Illinois Press; a co-edited volume (with Nicolette Makovicky), , published by Oxford University Press; a co-edited volume (with Anna Strhan and Joel Robbins), , published by Berghahn; and a co-edited volume (with Jaroslav Klepal and Ondrej Zila), (2025, Routledge).