Dr. Julia Koch

Julia Koch is an anthropologist with a focus on migration and religious practices. Her regional foci are Southern Africa and Western India and the transregional links across the Western Indian Ocean. In both regions she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork for her PhD thesis, which was completed at Münster Unversity. There she had joined the graduate school of the cluster of excellency „Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures“. Her dissertation was published with transcript in 2016. Her postdoctoral research project ‚Beyond the ‘New’ and the ‘News’ – The Mediation of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)‘ (working title) aims to investigate how South African discourses on social change are brought into and represented by broadcasting institutions. Other research interests include the methodology of ethnographic research, visual anthropology.


Migration, Islam; broadcasting, media anthropology


Indian Ocean; Gujarat/India; South Africa (Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Johannesburg)