CONTRIBUTOR:

Tea Virtanen

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Research Fellow

DEPARTMENT:

INSTITUTION:

University of Helsinki

BIOGRAPHY:

Tea Virtanen is an anthropologist and currently a Finnish Academy research fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Helsinki in 2003 and has done extensive fieldwork among the Mbororo Fulani pastoralists in the Adamaoau Region, Cameroon, since 1994, and more recently also among the urban Mbororo in the capital city of Yaounde. Previously Virtanen has worked e.g. as an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Joensuu, Finland, and as a Finnish Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. Her main research interests include West and Central Africa, pastoralist societies, local Islam, Sufism, rural-urban relations, and popular conceptions of indigeneity.