Ullrich Kockel is currently Professor of Cultural Ecology and Sustainability at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, Visiting Professor in Social Anthropology at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, and Emeritus Professor of Ethnology at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. He was elected to the United Kingdom’s Academy of Social Sciences in 2003, and the Royal Irish Academy in 2012. During his time as President of SIEF, the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (2008-13), he established the SIEF Working Group on Place Wisdom, and from 2007 to 2018 he was editor-in-chief of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.

Having previously worked in the oil industry, Ullrich has held various teaching and research positions across a range of humanities and social science disciplines in Britain, Germany and both parts of Ireland since the mid-1980s,. Throughout the 1990s, while based at the University of Liverpool, he worked closely with the European Centre for Traditional and Regional Cultures, and in 2000 was appointed to a chair in European Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research and publications range across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, with focus on tradition, place, community resilience, and indigeneity, primarily in European contexts.