Finding a supervisor
Our varied research interests allow us to offer postgraduate research supervision in a wide range of topics and regions.
Explore the research expertise of our staff below.
Dr Rupert Cox
Research areas:
- The theory and practice of sensory media (visual, aural, material)
- The intersections of art and anthropology
- The role of visual technologies(graphic and mechanical) in the history of representations of native peoples
- The anthropology of sound and the political ecology of military technologies, particularly aircraft
- Japan, where he has worked particularly on asceticism and the Zen arts, and ideas about copying and the heritage industry
Professor Jeanette Edwards
Research areas:
- Kinship (parenting, personhood, gender, families of ‘choice’, secrets and lies)
- The anthropology of science and technology (bodies, biotechnology, biomedicine)
- The politics of social class, community and identity
Dr Gillian Evans
Research areas:
- Education, childhood and youth
- Urban anthropology, including gender, youth, 'the street', crime, working class life in the city, urban elites, the state and urban policy, post-industrial regeneration and sporting mega-events
- The anthropology of Britain including race, class, ethnicity, indigeneity and multiculturalism
- Phenomenology, materiality, ontology and personhood
- Regional specialisation: UK
Professor John Gledhill
Research areas:
- Globalisation and transnationalism
- Politics
- Social movements and the state
- Urban and rural poverty
- Indigenous rights
- Historical anthropology
- Regional specialism: Mexico, Central America and Brazil
Professor Maia Green
Research areas:
- Development policy and categories
- Poverty and destitution
- East Africa
- Health seeking behavior and health systems (including 'traditional' healing)
Professor Penny Harvey
Research areas:
- Anthropology of science and technology (engineering; infrastructures such as roads, canals, railways; design and construction practices; material relations; experimentation)
- Ethnographic approaches to state formation, post-colonial politics, neo-liberal regulation and public participation
- Space and affect – landscape, mobility, environmental controversy, toxic economies
- The politics of communication (language practice, information technologies, community radio, digital visualisation, exhibitions)
- Regional specialisations are the Andean region, in Peru, Spain and the UK
Dr Andrew Irving
Research areas:
- Death
- Illness and medical anthropology
- HIV/AIDS
- Interior dialogue, memory and imagination
- Visual, sensory and bodily perception
- The anthropology of time
- Art, performance and aesthetics
- Experimental methods and collaborative anthropology
- Existential and phenomenological anthropology
- Urban anthropology and spatial perception
- Regional specialisations: East Africa and New York City
Dr Stef Jansen
Research areas:
- Hope, 'normality' and political-economic change, especially post-socialist transformations (yearnings, expectation, despair, planning, imagined futures)
- Anthropology of the state (state effects, borders, hegemony, resistance and compliance, senses of entitlement, ideology, cynicism, socialism and neoliberalisation)
- Home-making and place (displacement, entrapment, 'ethnic cleansing', the (im)possibility to cross borders)
- Everyday configurations of nationality and belonging
- Memory (remembering and forgetting, remembered normality, nostalgia)
- Regional specialism: post-Yugoslav states and other postsocialist states
Dr Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
Research areas:
- Practices of play, imitation, illusion, and simulation as transformative forces in social life
- Identity play and cultural appropriation in transnational settings
- Conceptions of indigeneity
- Materiality
- Material culture and human-thing relationships
- Anthropology of landscape and art
- Skill and knowledge production
- Ecological anthropology
- Human - non-human animal relations
- Anthropology of the senses
Dr Michelle Obeid
Research areas:
- Social change
- Agender and kinship
- The anthropology of political processes (elections, the state, borders, legality) and livelihoods
- Regional specialisation: the Middle East and Arab speaking populations
Dr Madeleine Reeves
Research areas:
- The anthropology of socialism and postsocialism
- Political anthropology
- Sovereignty, the state, and experiences of state "failure"
- Emotion and affect
- Borders and bordering
- Transnationalism and experiences of im/mobility
- The history of Russian and Soviet anthropology
- Regional specialisations: Central Asia and Russia
Dr Tony Simpson
Research areas:
- Identity
- Education
- Christianity
- Missionaries
- Religious conversion
- Medical anthropology
- HIV/AIDS
- Death
- Masculinities
- Childhood
Dr Katherine Smith
Research areas:
- Fairness and equality
- Social class
- Englishness
- Belonging
- Policy and the state
- Political correctness
- Democracy and democratic participation
- Humour and joking relationships
- Anthropology of moralities
- Anthropology of Britain
Professor Karen Sykes
Research areas:
- Social reconstruction and theories of society
- The anthropology of knowledge
- Aesthetics
- Ethics
- Intergenerational relations and property relations
Dr Angela De Souza Torresan
Research areas:
- Studies of favela (slums)
- Securitisation/pacification/violence
- Urban anthropology
- Economic morality of material practices
- Visual anthropology
- Ethnographic cinema
- Migration studies/transnationalism
- Brazilian international migration
Dr Olga Ulturgasheva
Research areas:
- Social change
- Personhood
- Shamanic and animist cosmologies
- Resilience
- Climate change and environmental transformations
- Place, locality and displacement
- Human-animal relations
- Childhood
- Adolescence
- Socialisation
- Memory
- Post-socialism
- Legacy of the Soviet Gulag
- Regional specialisation: Siberia, Alaska, Circumpolar North
Dr Soumhya Venkatesan
Research areas:
- Art and craft
- Weaving
- Islam
- Development
- Description and representation
- Material culture
- Regional expertise: South Asia, especially India, and Uzbekistan
Professor Peter Wade
Research areas:
- Blackness and racial identity in Latin America (and the Caribbean)
- Ethnic social movements in Latin America
- Constructs of nature, biology and culture in racial identity
- Genomics, genetics and race
- Ideologies of race, gender, sexuality and nation
- Popular music and identity (in Latin America and the Latino diaspora)
Dr Chika Watanabe
Research areas:
- Development
- Humanitarianism
- NGOs
- Questions of the secular, and relatedly, religion (especially in Asia)
- Ethics and morality
- Sustainability, the environment, disasters
- Regional specialisation: Japan, Myanmar