Professor Michael Herzfeld DPhil DLitt

Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University; IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus, Leiden University; Senior Advisor, Critical Heritage Studies Initiative, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden; a member of the doctoral programme in Beni Culturali, Formazione e Territorio, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’; and Chang Jiang Scholar, Shanghai International Studies University.

Author of 12 books (most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, 2022) and numerous articles and reviews, and producer of two ethnographic films, he has served as editor of American Ethnologist (1995 to 1998), is currently editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and editor-at-large (responsible for ‘Polyglot Perspectives’) at Anthropological Quarterly, and co-editor of Asian Heritages (Amsterdam University Press) and New Anthropologies of Europe (Berghahn).  

His research (primarily in Greece, Italy and Thailand) has most recently addressed the social and political impact of historic conservation and gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, spectral polities and modernist politics, crypto-colonialism, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals. 

He holds honorary degrees from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki), and the University of Crete. Among his academic honours are the J.I. Staley Prize (School of American Research, 1994) and the Rivers Memorial Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute, 1994). 

In 2021, he was awarded honorary citizenship of Greece for his services to the social sciences in that country.