Anna Schwenck is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sociology Department of Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for East European Studies and a habilitation candidate at the University of Siegen’s Department of Social Sciences. Currently, she holds a fellowship at the Forum Basiliense at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

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She was lead researcher of the project “African Musics and Politics: Negotiations of Violence in South African Popular Music” that formed part of the collaborative research centre „Transformations of the Popular”, a long-term university-based research institution funded by the German Research Foundation.
As scientific coordinator she was responsible for the comparative research design of the interdisciplinary project “Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany’s largest private, non-profit funding organization for academic research.

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Anna Schwenck received both her Ph.D. in Sociology and her M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University Berlin. She earned a B.A. in Cultural Studies from Viadrina European University, Frankfurt (Oder).
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She was a visiting student/scholar at several institutions, including University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, the Sociology Department at the University of California (Berkeley), the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and the Anthropology Department of the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town). 
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Her monograph Flexible Authoritarianism. Cultivating Ambition and Loyalty in Russia
(published by Oxford University Press) received the American Sociological Association’s Mary Douglas Prize for the Best Book in the Sociology of Culture in 2024 and an honorable mention of the European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies in 2026.

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