| Academic training |
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| 1996 Habilitation, Venia legendi for Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences II, Free University of Berlin |
| 1987 Doctorate (PhD) at Leibniz University of Hanover |
| 1985 MA in Agricultural Sciences of the Tropics and Subtropics, Georg-August University of Göttingen |
| 1982 Second state examination for the teaching profession at grammar schools, Hamburg |
| 1979 First state examination for teaching at grammar schools, Georg August University Göttingen |
| 1972-1979 Studies of sociology, political science, German studies and education at Georg August-University Göttingen and Free University Berlin |
| Academic positions |
|---|
| since 2019 Senior Research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz |
| 2002-2019 Professor of Anthropology at the Department for Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz |
| 1995-2002 Professor of Anthropology at the Department for Historical Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt |
| 1987-1992 Lecturer at the Department for Anthropology, Free University Berlin |
| Honorary positions, memberships, prizes and awards |
|---|
| since 2024 Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha |
| since 2021 Member of the Board of Trustees of the German Academy for Language and Literature |
| 2023 Award of the honorary membership of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology |
| since 2020 Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina |
| since 2014 Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities |
| 2023-2026 Member of the Board of Trustees of the Anne Frank Educational Centre |
| 2020-2024 President of the Goethe-Institut |
| 2018-2020 Vice President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities |
| 2016-2018 Secretary of the German Academy of the Social Sciences Class of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities |
| 2011-2015 President of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology |
| 2014 Melville J. Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association (USA) for the book Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2013) |
| 2013 Award of a Chieftaincy title (Maalu Naa) in the Nandom Traditional Area, Upper West Region, Ghana |
| Media appearances, interviews, podcasts |
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| only English language appearances; for German language appearances, see German version of this web site |
| Interviews and speeches as President of the Goethe-Institut, 2020-2024 |
| “As a German, you’re not always at the centre of the world.” Interview with Berliner Zeitung, 18.03.2021 |
Publications at a glance
| Recently published |
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| 2026. Aus der Wissenschaft in die Kulturpolitik (und zurück). Eine Ethnologin als Präsidentin des Goethe-Instituts. Arbeitspapiere des Instituts für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) 215. |
| 2025. Musical nationalism: the indigenisation of military marches in Ghana. Arbeitspapiere des Instituts für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) 214 (with Hauke Dorsch). |
| 2025. The future of remembering. Eurozine 19 Feb. (with Teresa Koloma Beck und Omri Boehm). |
| Monographs and edited volumes (selection) |
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| 2023. Josef Ehmer and Carola Lentz (eds.): Life Course, Work and Labor in Global History. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter / Oldenbourg |
| 2022 Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family (with Isidore Lobnibe). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. |
| 2021. Das Goethe-Institut. Eine Geschichte von 1951 bis heute (with Marie-Christin Gabriel). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. |
| 2018. Remembering Independence (with David Lowe). London: Routledge. |
| 2013. Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. |
| 2013. Thomas Bierschenk, Matthias Krings und Carola Lentz (Hg.): Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Reimer. |
| 2011. Carola Lentz and Godwin Kornes (eds.): Staatsinszenierung, Erinnerungsmarathon und Volksfest. Afrika feiert 50 Jahre Unabhängigkeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apsel. |
| 2006. Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (International African Library 33). |
| 2006. Richard Kuba and Carola Lentz (eds.): Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa. Leiden: Brill. |
| 2000. Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent (eds.): Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention . London: Macmillan. |
| 1999. Carola Lentz (ed.): Changing Food Habits: Case Studies from Africa, South America and Europe. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. |
| Articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes (selection) |
|---|
| 2025 :The future of remembering. Eurozine 19 Feb. (with Teresa Koloma Beck and Omri Boehm). |
| 2024. early-career funding in German-African academic cooperation: achievements, challenges, perspectives. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Food for thought from the Academy 16, January (with Andrea Noll) |
| 2022 Performing the nation and staging ethnic diversity in Ghanaian national-day celebrations. Ghana Studies 25 (1): 3-32. |
| 2022. Things that place names do: comparative perspectives from West Africa and Iceland. Anthropos 117: 453-466 (with Matthias Egeler). |
| 2021. Across regional disparities and beyond family ties: a Ghanaian middle class in the making (with Andrea Noll). History and Anthropology. |
| 2020. Studying national commemoration and political celebrations in Africa: The Online Archive African Independence Days. Africa Bibliography (with Marie-Christin Gabriel). |
| 2020 Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges. Africa 90 (3): 439-69.2018. |
| 2020 Embodying the nation: the production of sameness and difference in national-day parades (with Marie-Christin Gabriel and Konstanze N’Guessan). Ethnography 21(4): 506-536. |
| 2017 Culture: the making, unmaking and remaking of an anthropological concept. Journal of Cultural Anthropology 142 (2), 2017: 181-204 |
| 2017 Performing the national territory: the geography of national-day celebrations (with Konstanze N’Guessan and Marie-Christin Gabriel). Nations and Nationalism 23 (4): 686-706. |
| 2017. Ghanaian ‘monument wars’: the contested history of the Nkrumah statues. Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 227: 551-82 |
| 2017. ‘Kakube has come to stay’: the making of a cultural festival in Northern Ghana, 1989-2015 (with Trevor Wiggins). Africa 87 (1): 180-210. |
| 2016. World anthropology with an accent: the discipline in Germany since the 1970s (with Thomas Bierschenk and Matthias Krings). American Anthropologist 118 (2): 364-80. |
| 2015. Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde. Geschichte und aktuelle Herausforderungen (with Silja Thomas). Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 140: 225−53. |
| 2014. ‘I take an oath to the state, not the government’: career trajectories and professional ethics of Ghanaian public servants. In: Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (eds.), States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. Leiden: Brill, 175-204. |
| 2013 The 2010 independence jubilees: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa. Nations and Nationalism 19 (2): 217-37. |
| 2013. Ghana@50: celebrating the nation, debating the nation. Cahiers d’Études Africaines211: 519-46. |
| 2012 Education, careers and home ties: the ethnography of an emerging middle class from Northern Ghana (with Andrea Behrends). Journal of Cultural Anthropology 137 (2): 139-64. |
| 2010 Travelling emblems of power: the Ghanaian ‘Seat of State’. Critical Interventions 7: 45-64. |
| 2010. Hard work, luck and determination: biographical narratives of a Northern Ghanaian elite. Ghana Studies 11: 47-76. |
| 2009. Der Kampf um die Kultur. Zur Ent- und Re-Soziologisierung eines ethnologischen Konzepts . Soziale Welt 60: 305−324. |
| 2006 Decentralization, the state and conflicts over local boundaries in Northern Ghana.Development and Change 37 (4): 909-19. |
| 2003. Afrikaner in Frankfurt – Migration, Netzwerke, Identitätspolitik. Ergebnisse einer Lehrforschung. Sociologus 53: 43-80. |
| 2002 Arrows and earth shrines: towards a history of Dagara expansion in southern Burkina Faso (with Richard Kuba). Journal of African History 43: 377-406. |
| 2002. ‘The time when politics came’: Ghana’s decolonization from the perspective of a rural periphery. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 20: 245-74. |
| 2001 The political uses of ethnography: a workshop report. Paideuma 47: 147-160. |
| 2001. local culture in the national arena: the politics of cultural festivals in Ghana. African Studies Review 44 (3): 47-72. |
| 1999. Colonial ethnography and political reform: the works of A.C. Duncan-Johnstone, R.S. Rattray, J. Eyre-Smith and J. Guiness on northern Ghana. Ghana Studies 2: 119-69. |
| 1999. Alcohol consumption between community ritual and political economy: case studies from Ecuador and Ghana. In Carola Lentz (ed.), Changing Food Habits: Case Studies from Africa, South America and Europe, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 155-79. |
| 1998. The chief, the mine captain and the politician: legitimating power in northern Ghana. Africa 68: 46-67. |
| 1995. ‘Tribalism’ and ethnicity in Africa: a review of four decades of Anglophone research. Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 31: 303-28. |
| 1995. ‘Unity for development’: youth associations in north-western Ghana. Africa 65: 395-429. |
| 1994. Home, death and leadership: discourses of an educated elite from northwestern Ghana. Social Anthropology 2: 149-69. |
| 1989. Feldforschung als Interaktionsprozeß – Erfahrungen in indianischen Dörfern in Ecuador. Sociologus 39: 123–51. |
| 1989. A working class in formation? Economic crisis and strategies of survival among Dagara mine workers in Ghana (with Veit Erlmann). Cahiers d’Études Africaines 113: 69-111. |
| 1988. Zwischen ‘Zivilisation’ und ‘eigener Kultur’. Neue Funktionen ethnischer Identität bei indianischen Arbeitsmigranten in Ecuador. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17: 34–46. |
| 1988. Why the most incompetent are on the village council: development projects in an Indian village in Ecuador. Sociologia Ruralis 27: 199-215. |
| 2024 – 2026 Biography, generation and historical time in the making of an African middle class Research and publication project with financial support from the JGU Mainz Research Fund; Fellowship at the Einstein Center Chronoi, Berlin (9/2025-12/2025) |
| 2019 – 2021 Early-Career-Förderung in der deutsch-afrikanischen Wissenschaftskooperation. Eine Statuserhebung Project manager: Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz, project assistant: Andrea Noll. Project funding: BMBF. |
| 2013 – 2019 The Performance of the Nation and the Handling of Subnational Differences in African National Celebrations Subproject within the framework of the DFG Forschergruppe 1939 “Un/doing Differences. Praktiken der Humandifferenzierung” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Project manager: Carola Lentz; project managers: Marie-Christin Gabriel and Konstanze N’Guessan. Project funding: DFG. |
| 2009 – 2014 Boundary work: Police in West Africa. Project manager: Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz (employees: Jan Beek, M.A., Mirco Göpfert, M.A. and Agnes Badou), funding: DFG, Research Fund of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. |
| 2009 – 2013 Remembrance politics and national celebrations in Africa. Doctoral group as part of the program “Pro Humanities and Social Sciences 2015” of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz; Funding: Program “PRO Humanities and Social Sciences 2015. |
| 2006 – 2013 States at Work. Public Services and Civil Servants in West Africa: Education and Justice in Benin, Ghana, Mali and Niger . Project managers: Prof. Dr. Thomas Bierschenk, Mahaman Tidjani Alou (LASDEL Niamey), Funding: Volkswagen Foundation. |
| 2003 – 2006 The local appropriation of global products – the stock cube in Senegal Funding: DFG. Collaborator: Ruth Frackmann, M.A. |
| 2003 – 2004 Gemeinschaft im Exil. Eritreische Netzwerke in Deutschland . Funding: Center for Intercultural Programs of Study, University of Mainz. Staff member: Nina von Nolting, M.A. |
| 2000 – 2002 Land appropriation: appropriation of space and local identity in southern Burkina Faso. Subproject A 9. Funding: DFG within the framework of the SFB 268 “West African Savannah”. Employees: Dr. Richard Kuba, Dr. Katja Werthman. |
| 1998 – 2001 On the political and economic significance of purchasable alliances in the Cross River region (Cameroon/Nigeria). Funding: DFG. Collaborator: Dr. Ute Röschenthaler. |
| 1996 – 1999 Politics and history of mobile cults in southwestern Burkina Faso. Subproject A8. Funding: DFG within the framework of the SFB 268 “West African Savannah”. Employees: Volker Linz, M.A.; Michaela Oberhofer, M.A.; Kerstin Pinther, M.A. |
| 1996 – 1999 History of settlement and rule in the southwest of Burkina Faso. Subproject A9. Funding: DFG within the framework of the SFB 268 “West African Savannah”. Employees: Dr. Richard Kuba, Dr. Katja Werthmann. (Duration: 1996-1999) |
Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz
Room 01-688
Forum universitatis 6
55099 Mainz
Tel.: 06131-39 20124
E-Mail: lentz@uni-mainz.de