Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
University of St Andrews
Staff
We are very sad to announce the death of the co-founder of the department Dr David Riches, who passed away in October 2011. An obituary was published in Anthropology Today in the April 2012 edition.
Two new members of staff joined us in September 2012. Dr Sabine Hyland is appointed as a Reader and has come from St Norbert College, Wisconsin. She is a specialist in the Andes and writes on ethnopoetics, literacies and historical anthropology. From the University of Durham arrives Dr Stavroula Pipyrou, who works in Italy, Greece and Turkey. Her writing is in the area of political anthropology, kinship and dance.
We also welcome back Professor Roy Dilley who rejoins us from a three-year period outside the department, two years of which was served as Dean of Arts at St Andrews.
Dr Mark Harris took over from Professor Christina Toren as the Head of the Department in January 2011.
We have had the following fixed term postdoctoral fellows: 2010 Dr Hideko Mitsui (PhD Stanford), who has gone on to a lectureship at Macau University; 2011; 2011 Dr Suzanne Grant (PhD St Andrews) and now a MRC Fellow; 2011 Dr Morten Nielsen (PhD Copenhagen) then obtaining a lectureship at Aarhus University; 2011 Dr Craig Lind (PhD St Andrews) now a Teaching Fellow at St Andrews; 2012 Dr Jara Hulkenberg (PhD East Anglia) and now a Teaching Fellow at St. Andrews; 2012 Dr Stephanie Garling (PhD ANU); 2012/13 Dr Nina Holm Vohnsen (PhD Aarhus University)..
Research
Nigel Rapport was awarded the WH Rivers Memorial Medal in 2012 for ‘a body of work which has made a significant contribution to social, physical or cultural anthropology or archaeology’.
The department has been successful in winning a number of personal research fellowships and visiting professorships:
- Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship (Stephanie Bunn); and British Academy Research Development Award (Nigel Rapport).
- ECOPAS - European Consortium for Pacific (EU funding for the Centre for Pacific Studies, directed by Tony Crook). The project brings together a number of Pacific centres in Europe.
- Visiting Professor: Institute of Advanced Studies, Konstanz (Roy Dilley); Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Peter Gow); Universities of Hokkaido, Federal Fluminense, and Shandong (Pedram Khosronejad); Universities of Seville, Barcelona, Pisac, and London (Tristan Platt); Universities of Aarhus and Copenhagen, and Polish Anthropology Institute (Nigel Rapport); Universities of Ljubljana, Lisbon, Bergen and Oslo (Christina Toren).
We hold a weekly research seminar. In addition we host regionalist/special topic seminars, workshops and conferences. Most of these are associated with research centres or clusters. One exception was conference organised by postgraduate students and entitled, ‘The Anthropology of Political Violence’ (June 2011) at which Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart gave a keynote address.
The department has three well-established research centres: Centre for Amerindian Studies, Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, Centre for Pacific Studies. There are also research clusters focussing on African and Middle Eastern studies, on visual and material culture and the senses.
The Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ (directed by Huon Wardle) highlights include:
- adding to its longstanding publications series with the recent volumes by Platt, Fortis and Praet, and Mentore (see http://onlineshop.st-andrews.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?catid=203&modid=1&compid=1)
- appointing Sabine Hyland to help CAS build on longstanding strengths in Andeanist Studies that date back to the foundation of the Centre in 1969 by Douglas Gifford.
- organising and hosting international conferences: ‘Bodies: Amerindian Perspectives’; ‘Place and the Untranslatable’; ‘Visitors, Strangers and Imposters’; ‘Levi-Strauss’.
- convening a weekly seminar series; also a reading group of interested staff and students, ‘The Riddle of Place in the Caribbean and Latin America’.
- hosting a lively sequence of visiting fellows including George Mentore (Virginia), Nadia Farage (UNICAMP) and Robert Hill (UCLA) and Paulo Cesar Alves (University of Bahia, Brazil)
- http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/anthropology/centres/cas/
Similarly with the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies (directed by Nigel Rapport):
- collaborating with the Universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus to win an award of DKK 8,390,452 [£990,000] from the Danish Research Board for Culture and Communication for the project, ‘Distortion: Anthropology beyond the relation and the system’.
- organising an annual series of international conferences at St Andrews with external funding: 2009, ‘A Cosmopolitan Anthropology’; 2010, ‘Urban Times’; 2011, ‘The Imagination as Human Universal’; 2012, ‘Rethinking Humanism’.
- securing a British Academy Research Development Award of £103,500 to fund the writing project, ‘The Cosmopolitan Project of Anthropology’ (Rapport).
- http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~centrecs/
The Centre for Pacific Studies (directed by Tony Crook) has grown significantly since its founding in 2007. It has been
- convening the 2010 European Society for Oceanists (ESfO) Conference;
- initiating the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (ECOPAS) together with other Pacific Studies centres (CREDO Marseille, University of Bergen, University of Nijmegen), receiving major EU funding (FP7), and advising several EU and EC units with a Pacific remit.
- Co-organising the Pacific Connections' event with the European External Action Service at the European Development Days in Warsaw, December 2011.
- convening a reading group of interested staff and students, ‘The Gender of the Gift’;
- instituting a Pacific-Anthropology exchange between St. Andrews and Bergen Universities;
- organising the St. Andrews conference, ‘Kinship: Knowledge, practice, theory and comparison’.
- http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/anthropology/centres/cps/
The Visual Anthropology Unit has a research focus on the material as well. Highlights include:
- putting on the exhibition, ‘Seeing in a wider sense’, at St. Andrews City Museum, bringing together artwork and artefacts from Fife, Lewis, the Amazon and Tian Shan, and artists (Will Maclean and Marian Leven) with anthropologists (Bunn, Gow).
- initiating the collaborative research project, ‘Woven Communities’, with Scottish craftspeople, curators and plant specialists (Bunn).
- organizing the St. Andrews conferences, ‘Seeing in the Wider sense’, and ‘Woven Communities’ (Bunn), and ‘Visual Representations of Iran’, and ‘Photography and Cinematography in Qajar Era Iran’ (Khosronejad).
- convening the 31st NAFA Ethnographical Film Festival at St. Andrews (Khosronejad).
- initiating a research collaboration with the Collins Gallery, Strathclyde University, and running a Kyrgyz textile symposium. The project involved a visit from 10 Kyrgyz arts professionals and felt makers (Bunn).
Postgraduate students
The Department currently has 47 students matriculated on the PhD programme. We have a very strong postgraduate training consortium with Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, known as STAR (Scottish Training in Anthropological Research). Originally funded by the ESRC it is now funded through various sources, such as Roberts funded and local university money. This assures us of a number of ESRC DTC postgraduate studentships. Through STAR, anthropology students from the four Scottish universities meet together annually on various ocassions. These residential courses provide intensive pre- and post-fieldwork programmes for the development of skills for use within and beyond the academy.
Teaching
A new Masters course for 2012/13 MRes in Anthropology, Art and Perception was started and overseen by Dr Stephanie Bunn.
And a group of undergraduate students started the Ethnographic Encounters e-Journal in order to publish student work, especially relating to fieldwork projects (http://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/SAEE/index)
Full-time teaching staff
Dr Stephanie Bunn, Lecturer: Pastoral nomadism, material culture, human-environment relationships, learning and skill, childhood, space and perception, vernacular architecture.
Dr Tony Crook, Senior Lecturer: Papua New Guinea. Anthropology of Melanesia, knowledge-practices, 'secrecy', male initiation ritual, taro horticulture, anthropological epistemology, impacts of and responses to the Ok Tedi mine, machine-thinking, perpetual motion, genetic engineering, climate change.
Professor Roy Dilley: Economic anthropology, cosmologies, crafts and artisans, politics and power, and the ethnography of West Africa, Ireland and Scotland.
Dr Stan Frankland, Lecturer: East Africa and Uganda. Hunter Gatherers, Tourism & Development, Myths, Representation.
Dr Mattia Fumanti, Lecturer: Namibia, Ghana and African Diaspora in Britain, London. Topical interests include postcolonial studies, the state, citizenship, governance, elites and education, youth and popular culture, masculinities and femininities, morality, civil society and public spaces, religion, diaspora and transnationalism.
Dr Paloma Gay y Blasco, Senior Lecturer: Feminist Anthropology, Sex and Gender, Gypsies, Memory, Marginality.
Professor Peter Gow: Amazonia. Myth, history, kinship, aesthetics.
Dr Sabine Hyland: Andes, Peru, Inkas; ethnopoetics; historical anthropology; literacy, writing and politics; ancient scripts.
Dr Mark Harris, Reader: Ethnohistory, historical anthropology, ecological anthropology, the anthropology of embodiment and experience, social science methodology, anthropology of religion, Brazilian Amazon and South America.
Dr Stavroula Pipyrou, Lecturer (fixed term): Italy, Greece, Turkey, Linguistic Minorities, Mafia and 'Illegal' Organisations, Civil Society, Power and Governance, Kinship and Relatedness, Refugee Identity, Anthropology of Dance
Professor Tristan Platt: South America, Andes, Bolivia. Language, writing and politics; history and anthropology; liberalism and rebellion; textuality and silence; myth, memory and archive; colonialism, postcolonialism and ethnogenesis; mining, metallurgy and money; migration.
Professor Nigel Rapport: Individuality, globalism, semantics, literary anthropology, consciousness and narrative, and the ethnography of the England, Newfoundland, Israel and Scotland.
Dr Adam Reed, Senior Lecturer: Melanesia. Incarceration, literature and reading, new media and the city, London.
Professor Christina Toren: Fiji and the Pacific, Melanesia. Exchange processes; spatio-temporality as a dimension of human being; sociality, kinship and ideas of the person; the analysis of ritual; epistemology; ontogeny as a historical process.
Dr Huon Wardle, Senior Lecturer: Jamaica and The West Indies. Modernity, cosmopolitanism, creolisation, comedy and mischief, imagination and perception.
Research fellows
Dr Pedram Khosronejad: The Goli Rais Larizadeh Fellowship of the Iran Heritage Foundation for Anthropology of Iran Visual piety, Devotional Artefacts and Religious Material Culture in Iran, Persianate societies and the Middle East more generally.
Research Associates
Professor Joanna Overing, Emeritus Professor: Egalitarianism, gender, linguistics, philosophical anthropology, indigenous cosmologies, aesthetics, and the ethnography of Amazonia.