Reader in Anthropology; Learning & Teaching Coordinator
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.
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.
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology; BA Programme Convenor
South Africa; economic anthropology; anthropology of the state & institutions, bureaucracy, agriculture; livelihoods; health; nutrition; politics of food systems, food acquisition and consumption practices.
Reader in 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.
China: Hong Kong and Guangdong Province (PRC) Chinese media, newspapers, television, journalism, popular culture, Internet and telecommunications, theatre, anthropological knowledge, practice and performance
Sociality, belonging, and exclusion across cultural domains and scales; social constitution of the self; intersubjectivity; kinship/relatedness; psychological states; anthropology of experience; language and thought; tourism; heritage. Europe; Jewish world; zones of tourism encounter; global flows and imaginaries.
Professor of Social Anthropology, Research Coordinator
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
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
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.
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.
Tom Selwyn is a Professorial Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and the London Middle East Institute. He was awarded an Emeritus Professorial Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Foundation in 2014. He is widely published in the field of the anthropology of tourism/pilgrimage with regional interests in Palestine/Israel and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He directed/co-directed four major research and development projects in Palestine and Bosnia-Herzegovina for the European Commission between 1995-2005; founded the MA in the Anthropology of Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage at SOAS in 2010; and was awarded the Lucy Mair medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2009. Recent publications include 'The Future of Palestinian Tourism' in Isaac,R., CM Hall, F. Higgins-Desbiolles (eds), 2016, Power and Politics of Tourism in Palestine, London, Routledge; 'Tourism and Sight Prevention' in Andrews, H.(ed) 2016, Tourism and Violence, London, Routledge; 'The Rise and Fall of Orientalism in Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage: Report from Palestine/Israel', Tourism, Culture, and Communication, 17, 2017.
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).
