Dr. Olivia Killias

Biography

Olivia Killias is a senior researcher and lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich. She studied social sciences at the Universities of Lausanne and Amsterdam, completing her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Bern. Over the years, Killias has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Netherlands. Her dissertation, published as a book monograph, examines the migration of domestic workers from Indonesia, detailing the recruitment processes by local brokers and the challenges faced by these women in the global care economy. Killias has been a postdoctoral researcher at the BMBF-Competence Network on ‘Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia’ at Humboldt University of Berlin and has conducted research on the migration of Iranian students in Malaysia. Her current project, ‘Caring for Forget: Memory, Colonialism, and Loss in Dutch Elderly Care,’ is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and involves ethnographic work in nursing homes in the Netherlands. With teaching experience across various universities, she supervises BA and MA theses in areas such as political anthropology, globalization, memory, and visual anthropology.

Research Interests

Experience