People

Meet the researchers, lecturers and support staff who make up our Social Anthropology department.

Head of Department

• Professor Soumhya Venkatesan
  Professor of Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Craft, development and paradoxes, Freedom and the Right, Decolonisation, Philosophy in the world and worldly philosophy.

Academic staff

• Dr Sébastien Bachelet
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Irregular migration and forced displacement, Maghreb studies (especially Morocco), visual anthropology, participatory and creative methods, uncertainty and political subjectivity, advocacy and solidarity, illegalisation and criminalisation of pro-migration activism, humanitarian protection and displacement rights, arts-based research and creative engagement.
  
  
• Dr Jennifer Cearns
  Lecturer in AI 
  
  Research interests: Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, digital technology and intimacy, kinship and personhood, psychotherapy and relation to self/ other, Cuba, (post)socialism, value, anthropology of capitalism/ socialism, informal economy.
  
  
• Dr Rupert Cox
  Senior Lecturer and Director, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology
  
  Research interests: US military aircraft noise and Pacific war memory in Japan, Japan–Europe visual and material exchanges (16th century), Zen, asceticism, and traditional arts, art–science collaboration, political ecology of noise, military environments and public health, sound art and the anthropology of sound, sensory ethnography.
  
  
• Dr Sonja Dobroski
  Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: settler colonial theory, material culture, nationalism, semiotics & structuralism, Native American studies, Indigenous futurisms, museums & heritage, social history & ethnography of the Western United States, landscapes, historicity, object ID and analysis, collections and provenance research.
  
  
• Dr Meghan Rose Donnelly
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Catholic nuns, Southeast Asia especially Indonesia, theatre and performance ethnography, communal dimensions of self-becoming, embodiment.
  
  
• Dr Lorenzo Ferrarini
  Lecturer in Visual Anthropology
  
  
• Professor Maia Green
  Professor of Social Anthropology
  
  
• Professor Penny Harvey
  Professor of Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Political formations and state‑society relations in the Andes, infrastructure and material politics, anthropology of technology and expertise, objects and materials in social life, nuclear imaginaries and energy infrastructures, materiality & soft matter (e.g. concrete), ethnographic approaches to mega‑projects, knowledge, power and regulation.
  
  
• Professor Andrew Irving
  Professor of Anthropology
  
  Research interests: East Africa (inc Kampala, Uganda) and New York City, Death, Illness and Medical Anthropology, HIV/AIDS, Interior Dialogue, Memory and Imagination; Visual, Sensory and Bodily Perception; Art, Performance and Aesthetics; Experimental Methods and Collaborative Anthropology; Existential and Phenomenological Anthropology; Urban Anthropology and Spatial Perception.
  
  
• Dr David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Outer Space, Space Science, Community in the UK, Music Festivals.
  
  
• Dr Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
  Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: practices of play, rhetoric, imitation, and illusion; environmental futures and foresight; anthropology of landscape and art; human – non-human animal relations; material culture and human – thing relations.
  
  
• Professor Hannah Knox
  Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Anthropology of climate change, energy and infrastructure; creative methods; ethnography of engineering, materiality and expertise; anthropology of Britain and Latin America; anthropology of data; methodological experiments with environmental data; interdisciplinary and collaborative research.
  
  
• Dr Mateusz Laszczkowski
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: political anthropology, infrastructure, resistance, social movements, anarchist anthropology, multi-species ethnography, affect.
  
  
• Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Witch-hunting and gender relations in Papua New Guinea, feminist anthropology, ritual, environment and resource politics in Amazonia.
  
  
• Dr Michelle Obeid
  Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: political transformation in the Middle East, postwar sociality, livelihoods, state and borders, kinship and gender, mobility, displacement and home.
  
  
• Dr Jolynna Sinanan
  Senior Lecturer in Digital Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Everest tourism, mobilities, work and gender, glacial livelihoods, photography, digital and social media practices.
  
  
• Dr Constance Smith
  Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology 
  
  Research interests: urban anthropology, materiality, architecture, time, infrastructure, photography.
  
  
• Dr Katherine Smith
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Fairness and equality, welfare reform and social policy, poverty and dependence, class and Englishness, political correctness and humour, social care and responsibility, ethnography of contemporary Britain.
  
  
• Professor Karen Sykes
  Professor of Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Moral economy and value creation, theories of gift exchange, anthropology of knowledge, aesthetics and ethics, intergenerational and property relations, Oceania and Papua New Guinea.
  
  
• Dr Judy Thorne
  Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Utopian desire and futurity, crisis and lived experience, utopian ethnography and creative methods, affective labour and neoliberal workfare, care and kinship, gender, political activism, and economic, ecological, and emotional crises.
  
  
• Dr Angela Torresan
  Senior Lecturer in Visual Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Identity formation and cultural change, mobility and migration, ethnographic film and visual anthropology, Brazilian migration in postcolonial contexts, urban anthropology and gentrification, police violence and resistance, collaborative and engaged anthropology.
  
  
• Dr Olga Ulturgasheva
  Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology 
  
  Research interests: Anthropology of childhood, Environment and climate change, Arctic anthropology, shamanism and animist cosmologies, post-soviet / postsocialist transformation, human-animal relations, migration. 
  
  
• Professor Peter Wade
  Professor of Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: racism, anti-racism, nationalism, Latin America, Blackness, Indigeneity, intersectionality.
  
  
• Dr Chika Watanabe
  Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
  
  Research interests: Japan–Chile disaster preparedness, playful and creative methods of resilience, intergenerational kin-making and memory work, international aid and humanitarianism, patchwork ethnography.
  
  

Key staff

• Teaching & Learning Lead: Dr Sonja Dobrowski
• Undergraduate Lead: Dr Sébastien Bachelet
• Master's in Social Anthropology (MASA) Lead: Dr Michelle Obeid
• Master's in Visual Anthropology (MAVA) Lead: Dr Jolynna Sinanan
• Research Lead: Professor Hannah Knox
• Postgraduate Research (PGR) Lead: Dr Chika Watanabe

Support