Research
All academic staff engage in research and maintain a high level of publication. Approximately 50% of our students are registered for postgraduate degrees, offering a lively and supportive atmosphere. Anthropology and sociology are combined in our title to emphasise the range of our concerns, from remoter communities to more recent urban and global developments, avoiding any arbitrary distinction that may be implied by one term or the other.
The Department cultivates several specialist strengths that distinguish it from other anthropology departments in the United Kingdom. The most obvious of these is that all our staff are specialists on Africa and Asia (other areas of the world will fall within the School’s brief only insofar as peoples of African or Asian origin are found there). All staff are simultaneously attached as anthropologists to this Department and as regional specialists to their appropriate Regional Centre within the School.
As a Department, we also find that the general orientation of the School affects the way we approach anthropology. SOAS is, together with many other things, a language-teaching institute, and the Department is particularly known for its language-related work in such fields as cultural studies, semiotics, semantics, media studies, and interpretive and poststructuralist anthropology. The application of these perspectives has taken account of such varied subjects as gender, food, development, consumption, films, photographs and tourism.
