Reader in Anthropology, Director of Teaching & Learning
Palestine and the Middle East; human rights; nationalism; the United Nations; investigative commissions; political epistemologies; international law; anthropology of violence; political anthropology; historical anthropology
Richard Axelby is an anthropologist whose research interests span three interlinked areas: natural resource use; citizenship and identity, and the politics of development.
West Africa; material culture; cultural landscape; cultural memory; heritage; historicity; history of anthropology; colonialism; museum anthropology; exhibition practice; visual anthropology; migration and diaspora; culture and development.
Anthropology of organisations (especially parliaments and other legislatures); politicians and people in democracies; international development; relationship between research, policy and practice; UK, South Asia and Ethiopia.
East Africa. Corporations and capitalism, international development, moral economies, corporate social responsibility, enterprise and entrepreneurialism, inclusive markets, consumption and commodities, politics and practices of food governance, gender.
South Africa; economic anthropology; anthropology of the state & institutions, bureaucracy, agriculture; livelihoods; health; nutrition; politics of food systems, food acquisition and consumption practices.
Professor of West African Anthropology
; Associate Director of Research (Research Ethics & Researcher Development)
Anthropology of religion, religious reform (Islam and Pentecostalism), transnational religious networks (Tabligh Jamaʻat), faith-based development, urban anthropology, popular culture, gender, youth, West Africa (the Gambia, Senegal and Nigeria)
China (South); anthropology of food; consumption; regional cuisines; local speciality foods; urban society and the urban/rural divide; food commodity chains; borderlands; food and environment; food safety and risk; meat-eating and vegetarianism; ethnicity and local identities; socialist and postsocialist societies.
Reader in Anthropology, Undergraduate Program Convenor
Sociality, belonging, and exclusion across cultural domains and scales; identity and personhood; cultural models and conceptual schemas; transcultural encounter and interaction (esp in tourism); kinship and relatedness; “community” and well being; social inequality; psychological anthropology, institutional ethnography, ethnographic theory & method.
Professor of Social Anthropology, Director of Reseach
India, especially Tamil Nadu and adivasi western India; caste and religion, dalit politics, vernacular Christianity, environmental history, common property resources, indigenous irrigation, participatory rural development, aid agencies, anthropology of development
Senior Lecturer in South East Asian Anthropology, Director of Doctoral Studies
The anthropology of personhood, social theory and poststructuralism, religion (especially Islam), the anthropology of the gift and of Islamic economics, Indonesia and South East Asia.
Gender, Islam and modernity in the Middle East and Europe; Islamic feminism, secular and religious women’s movements in the Middle East, transnational migration and gender; multiculturalism and citizenship; Islam in Europe, globalization; disapora and refugee studies; the Palestine question.
Professor of Social Anthropology. Head of Department
Ethnography of western India; social theory and the Indian Ocean; disaster and reconstruction anthropology; post-colonial rural change; infrastructure development in South Asia
Ethnographically, the anthropology of West Africa in general, with a particular focus on the ‘Middle Belt’ of Nigeria and Cameroon. Ethnographic interests, both contemporary and historical, include: politics and religion; ethnicity and identity; material culture. Anthropologically, contemporary theories in social anthropology, and the history of twentieth-century British social anthropology.
Arabia (Yemen), West Africa (Northern Nigeria and Mali) and England: craft, carpentry and traditional building practices; apprenticeship, learning and cognition; space, place and architecture; theory in anthropology.
Lecturer and professor of African anthropology, SOAS 1964-1996; professor of social anthropology, University of Oxford 1996-2008, emeritus thereafter. Fieldwork in eastern Africa 1966-2002 for a number of years in total, among Luo, Giriama and Swahili-speakers, on Islam, entrepreneurship, political ethnicity, language, material culture, and medical anthropology.
Lecturer, Reader and Professor in SOAS 1967-2004; fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey; published on pastoral nomadism, ethnic and tribal minorities and the state, material cultures, culinary cultures, anthropology of Islam, Iranian Cinema.
Mukta Das completed a PhD in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS in 2018. Her research focused on South Asian food communities and networks in China's Pearl River Delta, particularly in Macau, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Her research explored notions of food belonging and identity and charted the transformations of these in the decades after the end of British and Portuguese colonialism in the region among South Asian food purveyors and how they had adapted to changing, immigrant-receiving Chinese realities.
South Asia; borders, roads and mobility, space and place, culture and politics, development, South Asia. Assistant Professor in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India.
Urban anthropology; anthropology of insecurity; architecture; Islamic reform; blood donation; memory especially nostalgia; Indian Ocean; South Asian diasporas in East Africa.
Britain, South Asia; cultural dimensions of mental health across nations, suffering, marginalised populations in psychiatric care in London and Chennai, cultural identity of Dalit groups (formerly 'untouchable' caste) in India. Senior Clinical Lecturer, Research Department of Health Sciences, UCL.
China: Hong Kong and Guangdong Province (PRC) Chinese media, newspapers, television, journalism, popular culture, Internet and telecommunications, theatre, anthropological knowledge, practice and performance
Conflict and conviviality, belonging and exclusion, indigenous and immigrant narratives of statehood in post-colonial, multi-ethnic spaces. Anthropology of coups. Ethnography of Parliament. Fiji (also Myanmar and Ethiopia).
