Welcome to Prof. Nasir Uddin
We warmly welcome Professor Nasir Uddin (PhD) at SAI as a Visiting Professor funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the Winter Term 2025/26. Prof. Uddin is a cultural anthropologist based in Bangladesh and a senior faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong.
Professor Uddin will offer a graduate seminar at SAI, titled “Forced Displacement, Refugees and Human Rights in South Asia” and organize a research workshop on “Refugee Crisis in South Asia”, while continuing research in collaboration with Dr. Philipp Zehmisch at SAI.
Professor Uddin has held Visiting Fellow/Visiting Scholar/Visiting Professor positions at Harvard University (USA), Oxford University (UK), Johns Hopkins University (USA), the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University (UK), the University of Sydney (Australia), the London School of Economics (LSE) at London University (UK), East-West Center, Washington DC (USA), Heidelberg University (Germany), VU University Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University (India), the University of Hull (UK), and Kyoto University (Japan).
He has achieved a good number of prestigious awards and fellowships including the MEXT Scholarship (Japan), the British Academy Visiting Scholarship (UK), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship (Germany), a Visiting Scholarship at LSE (UK), Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science or JSPS Fellowship (Japan), a Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University (UK), Asia Studies Visiting Fellowship at East-West Center, Washington DC (USA), James Fellowship in Social Science with SSSHARC at the University of Sydney (Australia), and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Kyoto University (Japan).
His edited books include “Life in Peace and Conflict: Indigeneity and the State in the Chittagong Hill Tracts” (Orient BlackSwan, 2017), “Indigeneity on the Move: Varying Manifestation of a Contested Concept” (Berghahn, 2017 [co-edited with Eva Gerharz and Pradeep Chakkarath]), “Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia” (Springer, 2019 [co-edited with Nasreen Chowdhory]), “Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns, and Burden Sharing” (SAGE, 2021), “Palgrave Handbook of Social Fieldwork” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022 [co-edited with Alak Paul]), "Media and Refugees: Local and Global Perspectives (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024 [Co-edited with Delaware Arif), “Reshaping Rohingya Futures: Coping Strategies and Emerging Agencies” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025) and “Scattered Lives of Stateless People: The Rohingyas in SAARC and ASEAN Countries” (Springer, 2025). His latest books are “The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life” (The Oxford University Press, 2020), "The Voices of the Rohingya People: A Case of Genocide, Ethnocide and ‘Subhuman’ Life" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) and "Indigeneity, Marginality and State in Bangladesh: Homeless at Home" (Routledge, 2024). His book, “The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life”, was short-listed for the ICAS book prize in 2020-2021. He is globally known as the theorist of ‘subhuman’ life, which is widely discussed and cited in the scholarship on refugees, stateless people, asylum seekers, forced migration, camp people, forcibly displaced people, IDPs, illegal migrants, borderland people, and non-citizens. His research at SAI, Heidelberg University, is ”the Refugee Crisis in South Asia”.
