Professor Edward Simpson
Head of Department
Professor of Social Anthropology

- Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4481
- Email: es7@soas.ac.uk
- Room: B400
- Academic Support Hours: Wednesdays, 9-10am (email for appointment)
Palestine and the Middle East; human rights; nationalism; the United Nations; investigative commissions; political epistemologies; international law; anthropology of violence; political anthropology; historical anthropology
medical anthropology; anthropology of medicine, psychiatry, science, and technology; STS; mental health, trauma, social ruptures, memory, and subjectivity; refugees and displacement; Iran; the Middle East; epidemics and pandemics; COVID19; HIV/AIDS
Political and economic anthropology, resilience and sustainability, uncertainty; infrastructure- governance, finance, sustainability; alternative lifestyles and sustainable forms of dwelling; narrowboat travelling communities (Boaters); Britain.
West Africa and India; anthropology of the state & institutions, bureaucracy, social movements, citizen participation; health systems and accountability; gender and sexualities; domestic and sex workers' rights movements; sexual and reproductive rights and health.
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.
Japanese society, material culture, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural history
South Africa; economic anthropology; anthropology of the state & institutions, bureaucracy, agriculture; livelihoods; health; nutrition; politics of food systems, food acquisition and consumption practices.
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)
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.
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.
Contemporary anthropological theory; critical social theory; philosophical anthropology; creative ethnographic methods (esp. literary and visual tools); gender and body politics; queer diasporas; queer pieties; racialised religions; neo-spiritual movements and subjectivities; politics of memory and secrecy
Natural resource use; citizenship and identity, and the politics of development.
The anthropology of work, aspiration and livelihoods, as well as experiences of mobility/immobility and development, and their relation to material culture and politics.
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).
Anthropology of tourism, pilgrimage, cultural heritage; the Mediterranean, in particular Palestine/Israel.
Anthropology and filmmaking.
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.
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.
Development, migration, (im)mobilities; francophone/Islamic West Africa.
Gender, marriage, politics, religion and secularism, neoliberalism; Turkey, Afghanistan.
Nepali society and culture; museology; social and cultural anthropology of the Himalaya; elite studies; heritage studies
Anthropology of death and life; religion and ritual; Buddhism; social study of life sciences; anthropology of biomedicine; innovative technologies and science-based entrepreneurship; market and exchange circuits; global markets and entrepreneurial diasporas; Việt Nam; Southeast Asia; Vietnamese diasporas in Eastern Europe.
Gender, body politics, sexual violence, citizenship; occupied Palestinian territories, Egypt, Syria.
Public space, ritual studies, urban violence, urban transformation; Iran, India.
Taiwan. Anthropology of education. Faith communities in Britain.
East and Northeastern Africa; refugees and asylum law, legal anthropology, development, urbanisation, civil society, ethnicity and nationalism.
South Asia - Nepal and urban India. politics of land, religious fundamentalism, post-colonialism. Gurkhas, Anglo-Indians.
South Asian rural and small town society, social and economic change
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.
Agrarian transformation, pilitical and social change, peasant consciousness, social identity; Northern Thailand, Laos, Tai peoples in Yunnan Province (China).
Middle East with emphasis on the Arabian Peninsular (especially Yemen): elites, biography, memory, religion and politics