Dr. Claudia Kalka studied ethnology, art history, and biology in Münster, Frankfurt, and Freiburg. After a 15-month field study among the Warao people in Venezuela, she completed her PhD. Following an internship in the ethnology department of the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover, she has worked since 1996 as a freelance ethnologist at universities and museums.
Her projects include, among others:
– the analysis of a collection of Baroque indigenous art from Quito and the creation of a catalogue for the Heylshof Museum in Worms (2016/17);
– the documentation, identification, and digitization of nearly 14,000 ethnographic objects in the museums of Schleswig-Holstein as part of the BMBF project “Schleswig-Holstein between Colonialism and Open-Mindedness” (2017–2020);
– the documentation of Bernd Muhlack’s African collection of 3,657 objects and the writing of a short biography for the Ethnological Collection of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (2021);
– participation in the DZK project “Hanseatics as Headhunters?” on provenance research concerning human remains in the Lübeck Ethnological Collection (2022–2024).
In the Lübeck section of the project “Dialogical Research on Early and Late Colonial Objects from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” she is responsible for cataloguing and processing the written and photographic estate of Bernd Muhlack. She prepares materials for the Cameroonian and Congolese project partners, organizes the related objects and provenance data, and investigates the trajectories of postcolonial collecting. She also works closely with Prof. Dr. Fürniss.
