Zainabu Jallo is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Anthropology working on material culture and the histories of criminal anthropology in Italy, Brazil and Cuba.

A part of the Swiss National Science Foundation project, “Inherited Futures?” Objects, Time, Knowledge, her ongoing research project is on material religion and criminal Anthropology.

Jallo held a guest Postdoctoral Fellowship within the SNF project “Conflict and Cooperation. Episteme and Methods Between Art History, Art and Ethnology in the Performative Pictorial Practices of Vodun” (University of Zurich), where she worked on the significance of materiality in transatlantic continuities of Vodun. Her project, “Material Expressions of West African Spirituality in the Americas: Transatlantic Continuities in Haiti,” was conducted in collaboration with the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt.

Zainabu is the author of  Diasporic Consciousness in the Material Culture of Brazilian Candomblé(2025), a book that examines the material culture of Candomblé and its connection to the changing cultural politics in Brazil. It employs artefacts as analytical tools to investigate the rise of a diasporic consciousness and how these items increasingly hold political and cultural importance in new social settings. She is also the editor of  Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice (2023), a series in Routledge Studies in Anthropology and Museums. Her scholarly interests include the history of criminal anthropology, museum anthropology, the Afro-Atlantic, iconic criticism, and material culture.

Jallo holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Bern, Switzerland  and also holds an MA in World Literature from the same institution, where her thesis

“Mythopoeisis in the Reinvention of an Ethnic Self: Aesthetic Tensions in Borderlands/La Frontera and A Cannon Between my Knees” accentuated the complex relationships amidst myth, culture, and ideology in Native American Literature.

She is currently an Early Career Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich, where she is working on The Making of the Infrahuman, a project linked to her ongoing investigations into the histories of Criminal Anthropology.

• Criminal Anthropology
• Material Culture
• Provenance Research
• Architectural Anthropology
• Diasporic Consciousness

• Afro-Atlantic ( Brazil, Cuba, Haiti)

• “Inherited Futures?” Objects, Time, Knowledge.
• Criminal Anthropology and Material Religion
• The Making of the Infrahuman: Criminal Anthropology and its Objects