Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
University of Manchester
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
Tel: 0161 275 4001
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology
Departmental report
Social Anthropology is in the Faculty of Humanities and part of the School of Social Sciences (SoSS) in Manchester along with Politics, Economic Studies, Philosophy and Sociology. Staff also have strong links with Manchester Research Centres including the Centre for Research in Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), Research Institute in Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC), and the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). Staff are as lively and enthusiastic as ever despite the current uncertainties facing Higher Education generally and the Humanities specifically, here in the UK.
2012 sees the three RCUK Fellows, Dr Gillian Evans, Dr Madeleine Reeves and Dr Andrew Irving, transferred to permanent lectureships in the department. Dr Michelle Obeid, Research Fellow for the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW), became a permanent member of staff following the end of her fellowship in 2011. Also in 2011, we appointed Dr Jonathan Mair, and reappointed Drs Petra Kalshoven and Katie Smith as temporary lecturers covering for staff on funded research projects. We continued to host a number of other research fellows. Dr Adi Kuntsman is half way through her three year Simon Fellowship, while recent visitors have included Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (Hallsworth Visiting Professor in 2009-10), Professor Steven Robin (Hallsworth Visiting Professor 2011-12), and Professor Jon Altman (Simon Visiting Professor 2010-11).
Manchester will host the biennial IAEUS conference in 2013, chaired by Professor John Gledhill , and hosts the lively and popular Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) convened annually by Dr Soumhya Venkatesan. The Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology goes from strength to strength, and in addition to the four postgraduate programmes it supports it now also offers a practical short course in film-making for fieldwork. Professor Sarah Green continues to be busy with EastBordNet, a 27-country, 280-person research network funded by COST (Cooperation of Science and Technology in Europe), Professor Karen Sykes, alongside Professor Chris Gregory and Professor Fiona McGowan (QUB), with an ESRC funded project on “The Domestic Moral Economy: An ethnographic study of value in the Asia-Pacific region”, and Professor Peter Wade with a major transnational project “Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America: a comparative approach”.
Manchester will be hosting its second Manchester Anthropology Day on June 26 2012.
StaffJeanette Edwards took over from Sarah Green as Head of Department in 2010.
Rupert Cox (PhD 1998, Edinburgh; Lecturer in Visual Anthropology) Visual history of anthropology, history and memory, museums and heritage displays; Asceticism and the traditional arts in Japan; visual history of mutual perceptions of Japan and Europe following the first contacts in the sixteenth century; history and culture of Orientalist automata
Jeanette Edwards (PhD 1990, Manchester; Professor of Social Anthropology) The relationship between language, social class and identity, the social implications of assisted reproductive technologies, kinship and expertise, and public understandings of science; biopolitics; Britain and Europe.
Gillian Evans (PhD 2002, Brunel University; RCUK Fellow, CRESC) Anthropology and education, child development, kinship, community and urban history; the politics of place, post-industrial cities, Olympic Games, social class, gender, race and culture; UK and Europe.
Ian Fairweather (PhD 2002, Manchester) Museums, heritage, postcolonialism, religion; Namibia
John Gledhill (BLitt 1973, Oxford; Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology) Rural poverty, agrarian change and international migration, comparative political systems, social movements and the politics of human and indigenous rights, historical anthropology; Mexico and developing interest in Brazil
Nina Glick-Schiller (PhD 1975, Columbia; Director, Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures). Regional specialisation in USA, the transnational Caribbean, Haiti and Germany. Her topical interests include transnational processes and globalisation; the migration process in comparative perspective; long distance nationalism; ethnicity, identity; and racialisation; globalisation, theories and methods of transnational studies; medical anthropology/sociology; social theory, ethnographic research methods.
Maia Green (PhD 1993, London School of Economics; Professor of Social Anthropology) Anthropology of religion, political participation and anti-witchcraft movements; professional expertise in social development addressing poverty, gender, participation, local government, civil society, education and health; East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), fieldwork among Pogoro Catholics, Southern Tanzania
Sarah Green (PhD 1992, Cambridge) Personhood, embodiment, gender and sexuality, landscape, political borders, place and environment, the social contexts of internet use and ICTs; Britain and Greece, fieldwork in London, Manchester, Epirus (northwestern Greece) and the Argolid Valley (Peloponnese, southern Greece). The political and cultural contexts of historical change underlie much of her work.
Penelope Harvey (PhD 1987, London School of Economics; Professor of Social Anthropology) Language and power, the politics of communication, gender, representation, modernity and the state, technology and skilled practice; South America, fieldwork in Peruvian Andes and Expo’ 92, Seville, Manchester
Paul Henley (PhD 1979, Cambridge; Director, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology) History and methodology of ethnographic film making; ethics and the digital humanities; ethnology of Amazonia; fieldwork among Amerindian and Black communities in Venezuela
Andrew Irving (PhD 1999, School of Oriental and African Studies, London; RCUK Fellow, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology) Experiences of illness, death and dying (especially from HIV/AIDS), in relation to the aesthetic appreciation of time, existence, and otherness; phenomenology, art, performance and creativity, time, comparisons of personhood, religious change, gender and urban experiences; Kampala, Uganda and New York, USA
Stef Jansen (PhD 2000, Hull; Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology) Displacement, experiences of 'home', identity, nationalism, resistance and memory, war, violence and ethnic cleansing; post-Yugoslav and other post-communist states.
Petra Tjiske Kalshoven (PhD 2006, McGill University Montreal; Lecturer in Social Anthropology). Anthropology of skill, knowledge production, and landscape; practices of art, imitation, and display (including taxidermy and reenactment in Europe and the UK.
Andrew Lawrence (MA Visual Anthropology, Manchester 1997; Teaching Fellow in Visual Anthropology). Independent film-maker making drama and documentary films for broadcast and festival release.
Sharon Macdonald (DPhil 1987, Oxford; Professor of Social Anthropology) Culture and identity; museums and material culture; tourism; history and memory; science as culture; anthropological theory and practice; Europe (UK, Germany)
Jonathan Mair (PhD 2008, Cambridge). Ethnography of China, Taiwan, UK; the anthropology of religion, ethics, the good life, belief and ignorance.
Keir Martin (PhD 2006, Manchester; Lecturer in Social Anthropology). Regional specialisation in Papua New Guinea, conducted fieldwork in East New Britain Province on the aftermath of the volcanic eruptions of 1994. Topical interests include post-disaster reconstruction and resettlement, moral political economies, and the role of contested language use in social change.
Michelle Obeid (PhD 2006, LSE. Lecturer in social anthropology). Regional specialisation in Middle East and Middle Eastern diaspora populations. Topical interests include kinship in relation to social, economic and political change; idioms of closeness in marriages, households and lineages; border zones; gender and development; migration and diaspora.
Madeleine Reeves (PhD 2008, Cambridge. RCUK Research Fellow, CRESC). Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the Ferghana valley, specialist on anthropology of the state, borders and the technologies through which state spatiality is produced. Also reconfiguration of social scientific knowledge in Central Asia after socialism, and in conceptual translation between Anglophone and Russophone anthropology.
Anthony Simpson (PhD 1996, Manchester; Lecturer in Social Anthropology). Identity, education, Christianity, missionaries, religious conversion, medical anthropology, HIV/AIDS, death, masculinities, childhood; Central and Southern Africa
Katherine Smith (PhD 2009, University of Wales, Lampeter; Lecturer in Social Anthropology ). The anthropology of Britain, with a specific focus on the intersections of race and class and concepts of fairness.
Karen Sykes (PhD 1995, Princeton; Professor of Social Anthropology). Cultural anthropology, practice theory, epistemology, violence, kinship and exchange, education and socialisation, national culture, public anthropology; Oceania, fieldwork in Melanesia.
Angela Torresan (PhD 2004, Manchester; Lecturer in Visual Anthropology). Brazilian migrants in Lisbon; is currently working on quilombola (black community) land claims in Brazil, and also on art and identity in the Brazilian northeast.
Soumhya Venkatesan (PhD 2002, Cambridge; Lecturer in Social Anthropology). Art and craft production; weaving; the agency of objects; development and Islam; South Asia, especially India
Peter Wade (PhD 1985, Cambridge; Professor of Social Anthropology) Ethnicity, race and racism, black culture and identity, urban anthropology, nationalism, popular culture and popular music, Latin American cultural studies; race and genetics; Latin America, specifically Colombia and other Latin American countries with Black populations, fieldwork among Afro- Colombians.
Richard Werbner (PhD 1968, Manchester, Professor Emeritus of African Anthropology, Honorary Research Professor in Visual Anthropology) Ritual, personal and historical narrative, politics, law, regional analysis; South-Central Africa, fieldwork among the Kalanga (Zimbabwe and Botswana) and Tswapong (Botswana)
Leslie Woodhead OBE (Honorary Companion of the University of Manchester): Has directed eleven Disappearing World films whilst at the same time pursuing a distinguished career as a political drama-documentary director.
Honorary Fellows
Susanna Hoffman (PhD, Manchester)
Itsushi Kawase (PhD, Kyoto)
Cecilia McCallum (PhD, LSE)
Aspasia Theordosiou (PhD , Manchester)
Pnina Werbner (PhD, Manchester)
Amanda Ravetz (PhD, Manchester)
Stephen Reyna (PhD, Columbia)
Alyssa Grossman (PhD, Manchester)
Karolina Szmagalska-Follis (PhD, New School)
Ligia Maria de Souza Dabul (PhD, Universidade Federal do Ceara)
Nikoletta Katsakiori (PhD, Manchester)
Alberto Corsin Jimenez (PhD, Oxford)
Alex Flynn (PhD, Manchester)
Anthropologists in other departments at Manchester
Atreyee Sen, specialist on India, gender, violence and nationalism. Lecturer in Religious Studies
Hannah Knox, Anthropology of Engineering, Anthropology of the Information Society, Imaginaries of the Future, Comparative Anthropology of Expertise, Britain and Latin America.
Stewart Muir, Australian Aboriginal cultural heritage; Aboriginality in New Age visions of the nation; English family traditions
Annabel Pinker, the state, Latin America, governance.
Gemma John, attached to CRESC, transparency, information, the state and Big Society
Caroline Moser, Urban poverty and inequality in cities of the South, particularly Latin America.
Anna Lora-Wainwright, Anthropology of rural China, medical anthropology, social change and everyday life experiences. Centre for Chinese Studies.
Peter Cave, Education and socialization in Japan. Lecturer in Japanese Studies.
Roger Ballard, Urban ethnicity, change, migration, medical and welfare provision; India, Pakistan, Britain.
Lynn Schumaker, History of medicine in Africa, medical sociology and anthropology, historical sociology of science, technology and medicine