Professor Christopher Hann

Former director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Born in in Cardiff and brought up in the new town of Cwmbrân, Professor Hann was educated at Oxford (BA) and Cambridge (PhD). He is a social anthropologist with extensive field experience in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and China (Xinjiang). Thematically, his main interests include economic development, ethnicity and nationalism, civilizational analysis, and the social and moral foundations of both socialist and post-socialist societies. Between 1999 and his retirement in 2021, he was a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). He is an ordinary member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute which awarded him the Huxley medal, its highest honour, in 2019.