Dr Alina Apostu

I completed my PhD in Anthropology and Sociology in 2019 and taught core anthropology modules to UG students between 2017 and 2020. I’ve caried out student experience projects to nurture student-staff partnership and communication and improve university experience for UG and PG students in my role as Student Experience Officer at St George’s University of London. 

My research interests focus on future-making, heritage, and the role that senses and affects play in shaping human relationships and socio-political structures and processes. My PhD (SOAS University of London, 2019), a comparative sensory ethnography of sound, music and community-making in two Anglican churches in London, illustrated how sound shapes individual and collective religious subjectivities by mediating relationships with different manifestations of the ‘Other’.

My research activity is complemented by R&D and administrative experience as organiser/coordinator of several conferences, workshops and reading groups (the Anthropology in London Day conference, the Anthropology of Christianity reading and research group). 

When my mind is not wondering about people and their quirks, my feet are wandering for miles or my hands are discovering the joys and frustrations of forming clay into pots.

Office hours

• Academic Advising: Monday 11:00am-12:00pm (noon), please book an appointment
• Office hours: Monday 3:00pm - 4:00pm, please book an appointment.

(forthcoming, 2023) Sacred and secular: coming in and out of sync through musical heritage. In: De Jong, F. and Mapril, J. (eds). The Future of Religious Heritage: Entangled Temporalities of the Sacred and the Secular. Routledge

Affect, senses (in particular sound), future-making, heritage, time and temporality, urban anthropology, religion

Currently developing a project on future-making among people born after the fall of communism in Romania, with a particular focus on urban settings and their sensory dimensions.

Principal researcher in Hillingdon Food Stories, an independent project that aims to document the foods, histories, and trajectories of dishes in London’s most diverse borough. For this project, I’ve been working closely with SOAS students who have developed their own themes of research. An exhibition stemming from this project will be produced in collaboration with Hillingdon Arts and Heritage in July-August 2023.