Ute Röschenthaler obituary
We mourn the loss of our esteemed colleague and friend, Prof Dr Ute Röschenthaler, who passed away unexpectedly on 18 March 2024.
As an internationally renowned specialist in cultural entrepreneurship, intellectual property and cultural mobility, Ute Röschenthaler played a key role in the conception and implementation of our joint project as Principal Investigator. Within CEDITRAA, she led a research project on the legal dimensions of the digital transformation of artistic practices in the context of the Nigerian music industry and conducted research on the popularity of African music in South Korea. She has played a leading role in a series of workshops and conferences organised with international project partners, most recently the conference “Afrobeats: Digital Encounters and the Global Mainstreaming of African Popular Music”, which took place at the University of Lagos in September 2023.
With the passing of Ute Röschenthaler, we have lost an admirable scholar whose extensive oeuvre includes work in the fields of economic, legal, social and media anthropology, as well as memory culture and migration studies. These include internationally acclaimed studies on cult associations in Cameroon (“Purchasing Culture”), intellectual property rights in Africa (“Copyright Africa”), trade networks in the global South (“Africa’s Agency in China’s Tea Trade”, “A History of Mali’s National Drink”), various facets of African entrepreneurship, product histories, advertising and photography. An accomplished ethnographer, she has lived in Cameroon, Mali and Nigeria, and her transregional research has taken her to China, Malaysia and South Korea.
Most recently, she was a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and previously at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Among the many doctoral students she has supervised in Frankfurt, Mainz and Youndé are students from Germany, Cameroon and Nigeria.
We will miss Ute. She leaves us with a noticeable gap.
Vinzenz Hediger, Matthias Krings, Cornelia Storz and the whole CEDITRAA team
