He received a Magister in Ethnologie in 1998 at the Freie Universität Berlin, and a PhD from Cornell University in 2006. He taught at Princeton University in 2006 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University in 2007. He has conducted ethnographic field research in Gibraltar, the United States, and India on topics including ritual, religion, violence, nationalism, identification, abjection, and affect. He is the editor of Violence: Ethnographic Encounters (2009), and author of Muslimische Heilige in Gujarat: Sufismus, Synkretismus, und Praxis im westlichen Indien (2008), as well as the forthcoming Pratikriya (Reaction): Nationalism, Nonviolence, and Pogrom in Gujarat.