DPhil Student
Linacre College
Thesis Title: Translating Alterity: Interrogating the Category of Magic in the Ethnographic Museum (1874–1951)
Research Summary
This project examines the historical formation of the category of “magic” within late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology, with a particular focus on the Pitt Rivers Museum and the ethnographic museum more broadly. Drawing on archival materials, museum catalogues, foundational anthropological texts, and provenance research/object-based study, it traces how local terms and practices were translated into European classificatory systems and what these processes might reveal about colonial-era taxonomies, cross-cultural translation, and the diminished states and/or enduring potencies of ritual objects within museum collections.
Research Interests
Historical anthropology; critical museology; philosophy of science; archaeology; linguistics; digital ethnography
Bio
Sofia is an interdisciplinary researcher currently reading for a DPhil in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the historical construction of the category of “magic” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology and its articulation within ethnographic museums.
She graduated with distinction from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2019 with a BA in English Literature and Anthropology, and completed a two-year MA in Archaeology at the University of Bologna in 2022, receiving first-class honors (110 e lode) and graduating first in her cohort. Since then, Sofia has received an Emerging Scholar Award from the Inclusive Museum Research Network, published in journals such as Museum International, and worked in museums as a Development Manager, Curatorial Assistant, and Educational Apprentice.
Her professional expertise spans grant writing, community-based storytelling, and interpretive exhibition planning. Aligned with her academic interests, she is particularly concerned with questions of narrative authority—who gets to tell stories—and the political construction of knowledge in cultural spaces.
Email: sofia.karliner@linacre.ox.ac.uk
Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofia-karliner-085413a4
