Nikolaos Olma is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean. He earned his PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 2018, with a dissertation that examined the nexus of embodied memory and urban infrastructure in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Currently, he is working on a book project that explores the various processes of (un)knowing that inform life with radioactive uranium tailings in Mailuu-Suu, a former uranium mining town in Kyrgyzstan. His research interests span economic and environmental anthropology, with a focus on socio-economic change, post-socialism, extractivism, the politics of (un)knowing, pollution and toxicity, infrastructure, and informal mobility.

Nikolaos has previously taught at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, as well as the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He has held postdoctoral positions at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), and served as a visiting researcher at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum/Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-resources in Bochum, the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, and the University of Cambridge. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Poland. His work has been published in international edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals.

Nikolaos is a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA), the Association of Social Anthropologists Greece (SKAE), and the European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS). He is a convenor of the EASA Anthropology of Economy Network and a participating researcher in the ERC-funded project “Anthropogenic Environments in the Future Tense: Loss, Change, and Hope in Post-Soviet Industrial Landscapes (ANTHEFT)” at the University of Vienna. He is also a member of the international research network CityIndustries (cityindustries.org).