SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Magdalena Moorthy Kloss is an FWF Erwin Schrödinger Postdoctoral Fellow at ISA and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Her research examines slavery, dependency and social hierarchies in Yemen and the wider Arabian Peninsula through an interdisciplinary lens. 

Her current project examines how Western and local concepts of slavery and abolition collided during the British protectorate in South Yemen (1872-1963). The analysis focuses on the formation and reinterpretation of categories of (un)freedom, social hierarchy and race, and on the effects of these processes on (formerly) enslaved people and their descendants.

Magdalena holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Vienna, and an M.Sc. in Anthropology and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her first monograph Unfree Lives - Slaves at the Najahid and Rasulid Courts of Yemen (Brill, 2024) illuminates Yemen’s forgotten history of slavery by analysing medieval Arabic narrative and administrative sources. It was a finalist for the 2025 Paul E. Lovejoy Prize. She has published in the journals History and Anthropology and Der Islam, and in the Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery (2023). Besides academia, she has worked for international organisations in Yemen, Egypt and Austria.

PROJECT (Leader)

• Slavery and Post-Slavery in South Yemen under British rule