Dr Mette Louise Berg
Teaching and Research Interests
Mette Louise Berg is a departmental lecturer in social anthropology and is course director of the MSc in Migration Studies 2011-12. Mette holds a Masters degree in anthropology from Copenhagen (1999) and a DPhil in social anthropology from Oxford (2004). She taught at the University of St Andrews 2004-07. She has carried out research on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora since 1998. Her first fieldwork focused on the transformation of Old Havana, the colonial core of the Cuban capital, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This research focused on ‘race’, social marginalisation and narratives of Cubanness. Her doctoral research on the Cuban diaspora in Spain was based on multi-sited, transnational fieldwork (in Spain, Cuba and the US). Her doctoral thesis analysed the interplay between memory and politics among Cubans in Spain. The thesis was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute Sutasoma Award 2003. Her book Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics and Nation among Cubans in Spain was published by Berghahn Books in October 2011.
She has recently started new research on schooling and the reproduction of elites in socialist Cuba, funded by the John Fell OUP Research Fund.
Mette’s research interests are: diasporas, migration and transnationalism; cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism; the politics of memory and generational dynamics; gender and subjectivity; ethnographic fieldwork methodologies; academic labour; Cuba.
Mette is a member of the Flows and Dynamics research cluster at COMPAS.
Mette is also a member of the Urban Change and Settlement research cluster at COMPAS.
Mette is a native Danish speaker, and also speaks Spanish and German.
DPhil Students
Marisa Macari (co-supervised with Prof. Stanley Ulijaszek)
Contextualizing Migrant Weight Trajectories : A Case Study of the Mexican-born in West Queens, New York City
John McManus (webpage)
Sport, the internet and group identity in the Turkish diaspora
Publications
For a list of publications, please click here.