SOAS University of London

School of Arts

School of Arts Staff

Head of the School of Arts and Head of the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology

Professor Anna Contadini

Learning & Teaching Coordinator

Professor Shane McCausland

Research Coordinator

Dr Rachel Harris

Associate Head of the Department of Music

Dr Angela Impey

Chair of the Centre for English Studies

Dr Kai Easton

Permanent Academic Staff

Crispin Branfoot
Reader in the History of South Asian Art & Archaeology
Crispin Branfoot
Architecture, sculpture and painting in South Asia, especially in southern India; pilgrimage and sacred geography; material religion; colonialism and material culture.
Anna Contadini
Head, School of Arts
Professor of the History of Islamic Art
Anna Contadini
Arab and early Persian painting and the arts of the Islamic book in general, including the production of manuscripts of the Qur'an; art and material culture of the Islamic world; Fatimid art and architecture; the arts of Islamic Spain; artistic contacts between the Islamic World and Europe; aspects of contemporary Islamic art.
  • Tel: +44(0) 20 7898 4458
  • Email: ac24@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B306
  • Office Hours: By email appointment
Pamela Corey
Lecturer in South East Asian Art
Pamela Corey

Modern and contemporary art and critical theory; Southeast Asian art history and visual studies (expertise in Vietnam and Cambodia); urban studies; postcolonial studies; theories of subjectivity, space, diaspora, transnationalism, intermedia and aesthetics.

  • Tel: 0207 898 4452
  • Email: pc50@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B318
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 10.30-12.30pm
Lindiwe Dovey
Reader in Screen Arts and Industries
Dovey, Lindiwe - SOA IMG

African film and video (particularly their intersection); filmic mediations of African performance arts (music, dance, theatre); literary adaptation in Africa; contemporary film theory and 'World Cinema'; exile/immigration and violence in relation to African screen media; structures of film production, distribution, and exhibition in Africa; use of African languages in film

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4388
  • Email: ld18@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 404
  • Office Hours: Email for an appointment
Lucy Durán
Senior Lecturer in African Music
Lucy Durán
Music in the Mande world; Music of Mali, Guinea, Guinea Bissau; gender and music in West Africa; popular musics of Atlantic Africa; childhood music learning in West Africa; Cuban music, especially son and rumba; radio as a medium; and the world music industry.
  • Tel: 020 7898 4374
  • Email: ld@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 596
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays, 3-5pm
Kai Easton
Kai Easton

Colonial and postcolonial studies, especially South African literature (the Cape, Wicomb, Coetzee); gender and the culture of travel; Indian Ocean diasporas; theories of fiction and history.

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4373
  • Email: ke@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 394
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays and Wednesdays by appointment
Heather Elgood, MBE
Course Director of the Diploma in Asian Art
Hettie Elgood
Dr Heather Elgood is the Course Director of the Diploma in Asian Art. She is a specialist in Persian, Jain, Sultanate and Mughal manuscript painting as well as the ritual arts of Hinduism.
  • Tel: 020 7898 4445
  • Email: he2@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B310
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 2-5pm or by email appointment
Charles Gore
Senior Lecturer in the History of African Art
Charlie Gore
Modern and contemporary arts of Africa, including its histories of photography; visual and material cultures of West Africa, and their linkages to diasporic arts past and present; the arts of the Benin kingdom, masquerade, textiles and other art forms in southern Nigeria, as well as a particular focus on contemporary arts in Nigeria.
  • Tel: 020 7898 4443
  • Email: cg2@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B305
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 2-3.30pm
Nick Gray
Senior Lecturer in the Music of South East Asia
Nick Gray

Music of South East Asia, Indonesia, Bali, especially music for the Balinese shadowplay; composition; improvisation; analysis; music and religion

  • Tel: +44(0) 20 7898 4686
  • Email: ng18@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 505
  • Office Hours: Mondays 11-1pm
Rachel Harris
Reader in Ethnomusicology, Research Coordinator
Rachel Harris
Ethnomusicology; musics of China and Central Asia, especially Uyghur; recorded music; music and ritual; music, identity and politics
  • Tel: 020 7898 4513
  • Email: rh@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 513
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 11-1
Charlotte Horlyck
Lecturer in the History of Korean Art
Charlotte Horlyck

Visual and material culture of the Korean peninsula; Pre-modern Korean burial practices, particularly of the Koryŏ period (AD918-1392); Arts of the Koryŏ period, especially bronze mirrors and ceramics; 20th century  collecting of Korean artefacts; Heritage and museum practices; Gender and material culture.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4704
  • Email: ch10@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B403
  • Office Hours: Thursday 5-6pm and by email appointment
Keith Howard
Emeritus Professor of Music
Keith Howard
Ethnomusicology; anthropology; Korean music; music traditions in Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Thailand, and Siberia; studies of religion; composition; education; shamanism; early keyboard instruments, players and restorers
Angela Impey
Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology
Angela Impey
Music of southern Africa and the African Horn (Sudan); advocacy ethnomusicology; sound/music, memory and place; forced migration, cultural mapping and borderland identities; human rights and development
  • Tel: 020 7898 4433
  • Email: ai6@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 518
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 2-4 p.m.
Jaeho Kang
Senior Lecturer in Critical Media and Cultural Studies
Jaeho Kang

Critical Theory; Media Theory; Aesthetics; Art, Technology and Politics; Media Spectacle and Urban Space in East Asian Cities; Screen Culture and Media Art in Korea; Mega-Events in the Global South

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4585
  • Email: jk71@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 510
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 5-6 pm & Thursdays 5-6 pm
Kadialy Kouyate
Kadialy Kouyate

Kadialy Kouyate comes from a very large African musical family of dialis, who are well known in Mandinka history. Since 2005 he has been teaching the Kora to undergraduate and postgraduate students at SOAS.

Christian Luczanits
David L. Snellgrove Senior Lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art
Christian Luczanits

History of art and architecture of the Himalayan region; Buddhist art of the western Himalayas; Gandharan art; presenting and exhibiting Buddhist art; heritage, preservation and conservation.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4162
  • Email: cl46@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B407
  • Office Hours: Friday 10am-12pm
Shane McCausland
Percival David Professor of the History of Art; Learning & Teaching Coordinator
Shane McCausland

Pictorial arts of China - especially painting and calligraphy; East Asian narrative art; canons, collecting and connoisseurship; Chinese art and modernity

  • Tel: 020 7898 4705
  • Email: sm80@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B304
  • Office Hours: Term 2: Thursdays, 3-4 p.m; or by appointment
Caspar Melville
Lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Industries
Caspar Melville

Specialist interest in popular music, the music industry, music of the Black Atlantic, Afro-diasporic music scenes and London music scenes.

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4249
  • Email: cm54@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 512
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 14.00-16.00 (During term time) or email
Simon O'Meara
Lecturer in the History of Architecture & Archaeology of the Islamic Middle East
Simon O'Meara

Islamic architecture and urbanism; sociological dimensions of the art and architecture of North Africa, especially Morocco; architectural and visual theory; Islamic studies.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4559
  • Email: so20@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B302
  • Office Hours: Fridays 12:15-1pm & 5-6pm
Sarah Pett
Sarah Pett

Modern and contemporary Anglophone literature, the medical humanities, and South African studies.

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4384
  • Email: sp52@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 463
  • Office Hours: Wed 10-11, Thu 2-3 (online booking: see Biography)
Scott Redford
Scott Redford

Art, archaeology, and architecture of Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean, and SW Asia from the 11-14th centuries with a special interest in landscape, urbanism, and ceramics

  • Tel: 020 7898 4469
  • Email: sr63@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B303
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-5pm and by appointment
Sanju Sahai
Senior Teaching Fellow, Music
Sanju Sahai
Sanju Sahai represents the distinguished lineage of tabla players and teachers from Banaras. He performs internationally as a soloist and in a variety of ensembles, and has been teaching tabla at SOAS for many years.
Polly Savage
Senior Teaching Fellow, History of Art and Archaeology
Polly Savage

Contemporary art and curatorial strategies in twentieth and twenty-first century Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean; post-independence visual arts in Angola, Madagascar and Haiti; post-colonial critique and trans-national exhibition practice.

Timon Screech
Professor of the History of Art
Timon Screech
History of Japanese art; Edo painting; contacts between Japan and Europe in the 18th century; history of science in Japan; the theory of art history
  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4453
  • Email: ts8@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B408
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-4pm
Peter D. Sharrock
Senior Teaching Fellow, History of Art and Archaeology
Peter Sharrock
He is now focusing on the evidence in Indochina for the influence of tantric or esoteric Buddhism, developed in the great monasteries of the Ganges valley and diffused and developed in different ways through much of Asia.
  • Tel: 020 7898 4462
  • Email: ps56@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B406
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 3pm-4pm
Ashley Thompson
Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art
Ashley Thompson

Southeast Asian arts, aesthetics, literatures and cultural histories, with a focus on Cambodia, from the Angkorian to the post-Angkorian to the contemporary; Theravadin Buddhist arts, literatures and ritual; cultural heritage; sexual difference; deconstruction; memory and textuality.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4130
  • Email: at50@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B301
  • Office Hours: Wednesday 2-4pm
Tania Tribe
Senior Lecturer in Art History
Tania Tribe
Painting in Africa and the Americas; theory of art with special reference to Northeastern Africa
  • Tel: 020 7898 4462
  • Email: tt10@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B406
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 4-5pm
Louise Tythacott
Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art
Louise Tythacott

Chinese and Buddhist art in museums; history of Yuanmingyuan (or ‘Summer Palace’) collections; museology; colonialism and material culture; post-colonial critiques of museum representations; history and theory of collecting; art and anthropology.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4159
  • Email: lt15@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: B320
  • Office Hours: On Research Leave until term 2 2018-2019
Ilana Webster-Kogen
Joe Loss Lecturer in Jewish Music
Ilana Webster-Kogen

Ethiopian music; Music in Israel/Palestine; Biblical cantillation; migration and nationalism; music and gender

  • Tel: 0207 898 4334
  • Email: iw4@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 503
  • Office Hours: On sabbatical terms 1 and 2
Richard Widdess
Professor of Musicology
Richard Widdess
History and theory of Indian classical music; dhrupad; Newar music of Nepal; historical ethnomusicology; analysis of musical performance; cognitive approaches to music; music and meaning; music and religion
  • Tel: 020 7898 4685
  • Email: rw4@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 507
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 11 - 1
Richard Williams
Richard Williams

Music of South Asia; Hindustani classical music; historical ethnomusicology; cultural history; historical musicology and musical aesthetics; lyric, song, and musical literature; music and gender; music and religion; history of emotions

Amina Yaqin
Amina Yaqin
Urdu language and literature; post-colonial literature and theory; gender studies; South Asian literatures in English; feminism in a Third World context; gender and politics in Pakistan
  • Tel: +44(0) 20 7898 4305
  • Email: ay@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 470
  • Office Hours: Wednesday 13.30pm-14.30pm; Friday 13.30-14.30pm

Research Fellows and Associates

Atef Alshaer
Research Associate
Atef Alshaer

Linguistics, Arabic Literature and history and Politics of the Arab World. Lecturer in Arabic Language and Culture at the University of Westminster.

My research interests include language, politics and literature of the Arab world in particular. In Arabic culture, political discourses tend to draw on rich political and literary traditions which are used by various groups in different ways. I have researched, alongside other scholars, a number of interrelated themes, including nationalist and Islamist discourses and their interrelations in Palestine, political poetry, avant-garde classical and modern Arabic poetry, the politics and culture of movements such as the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, and the Lebanese movement Hizbullah; language and national identity in the Palestinian territories and postcolonial ideas and their relevance to Palestinian conditions and Arab narratives in general.

Gina Barnes
Professorial Research Associate
Gina Barnes

State formation; agricultural transition; urbanisation; landscape archaeology; East Asian archaeology especially Japanese archaeology and prehistory/protohistory

Mehreen Chida-Razvi
Reseach Associate
Mehreen Chida-Razvi

History of Art & Architecture of the Muslim World, focusing on Mughal South Asia; Artistic, historic and cultural links between 17th Century Muslim South Asia and Iran, Anatolia and Europe; urbanism in Mughal South Asia.

David W Hughes
Research Associate
David Hughes
Ethnomusicology; music of East Asia especially Japan; Japanese folk and theatre music; music and linguistics; Indonesian gamelan and Javanese street music
Alessandra Lopez y Royo
Research Associate
Alessandra Lopez y Royo

Alessandra specialises in the study of dance performance and media, especially photography. She has done extensive research in Indonesia and also in India. She has to her credit numerous publications.

Noriko Manabe
Research Associate
Noriko Manabe

Music and social movements; music and language; the internet and the music industry; popular music in Japan; Japanese hip-hop; music and trauma; children's songs; Cuba; ethnomusicology; music theory. 

Hwee-San Tan
Research Associate
Staff Silhouette

Ethnomusicology, Buddhist music in China, Taiwan, diaspora studies, intangible cultural heritage preservation, music in Singapore and Malaysia.

Massoumeh Torfeh
Research Associate
Massoumeh Torfeh

Massoumeh Torfeh, has been appointed UN Director of Strategic Communication and Spokesperson for Afghanistan and is a former senior producer in BBC World Service, specializes on the politics and media of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Postdoctoral Researchers

Emeritus

Mark Hobart
Emeritus Professor
Mark Hobart: Centre for Media and Film Studies

South East Asia, Indonesia, Bali: cultural and media studies; philosophical issues and eurocentrism in the human sciences; media and performance.

Elizabeth Moore
Emeritus Professor
Elizabeth Moore
Arts of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia cultural landscape; pre- and proto-historic Myanmar, Pyu and Mon culture; visual culture, social memory and sacred landscape
Youngsook Pak
Emeritus Reader
Youngsook Pak

Korean art history (from prehistory to the 20th century), Buddhist art, Confucian elite and its culture, Text and Images

John Picton
Emeritus Professor
John Picton

The art and archaeology of Nigeria, masquerade, textile history, 20th-century transformations in the visual culture of sub-Saharan Africa

Annabelle Sreberny
Emeritus Professor
Anabelle Sreberny: Centre for Media and Film Studies

Middle East, especially Iran; gender and democratization; diasporic cultures; ‘small media’ and political change.

Owen Wright
Emeritus Professor of Musicology of the Middle East
Owen Wright
Music of the Islamic Middle East; historical musicology

Associate Members (Centre for Media Studies)

Gilbert Achcar
Gilbert Achcar

Political economy and sociology of globalisation; global power structure and grand strategy; empire theory and US hegemony; politics and development of the Middle East and North Africa; sociology of religion; Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism; social change and social theory.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4557
  • Email: ga3@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 292b
  • Office Hours: Mon. 2-4
Stephen Chan, OBE
Stephen Chan

Politics of southern Africa, normative values and non-Western methodologies

  • Tel: 020 7898 4655
  • Email: sc5@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 253
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 4pm - 5pm
Lindiwe Dovey
Reader in Screen Arts and Industries
Dovey, Lindiwe - SOA IMG

African film and video (particularly their intersection); filmic mediations of African performance arts (music, dance, theatre); literary adaptation in Africa; contemporary film theory and 'World Cinema'; exile/immigration and violence in relation to African screen media; structures of film production, distribution, and exhibition in Africa; use of African languages in film

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4388
  • Email: ld18@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 404
  • Office Hours: Email for an appointment
Narguess Farzad
Narguess Farzad
Persian language and literature. Organiser of SOAS-Cambridge Undergraduate workshops
  • Tel: +44(0)20 7898 4346
  • Email: nf1@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 440
  • Office Hours: Wednesday 3-4, Thursday 1-2, or by appointment
Sian Hawthorne
Sian Hawthorne

Narrativity; Cultural Memory; Religion and Gender; Feminist Historiography; Postcolonial theory; Postsecularism and gender; Intellectual history in the study of religions.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4215
  • Email: sh79@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 337
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 11am-1pm
  • On Sabbatical:Research leave - Term 2 - 2017-18
Stephen P Hughes
Stephen Hughes
India, especially the Tamil-speaking south, and Sri Lanka: popular cinema, media theory, historical anthropology and visual anthropology
  • Tel: 020 7898 4070
  • Email: sh37@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 558
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 11.00-13.00
Griseldis Kirsch
Griseldis Kirsch

Contemporary Japanese culture, with particular interest in Japanese media and popular culture, representations of 'Otherness', social phenomena and war memory.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4288
  • Email: gk10@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 377
  • Office Hours: Email for an appointment
  • On Sabbatical:Terms 1-3, 2017/18
Kevin Latham
Kevin Latham
China: Hong Kong and Guangdong Province (PRC) Chinese media, newspapers, television, journalism, popular culture, Internet and telecommunications, theatre, anthropological knowledge, practice and performance
  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4423
  • Email: kl1@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 565
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 11.30-13.00
Nima Mina
Mina Nima - NME IMG 240, 186, 56
Classical and Modern Persian literature, Orientalism in 18th-20th century Europe, Middle Eastern minority writers in Europe, Diaspora studies, music performance, translation studies
  • Tel: 020 7898 4315
  • Email: nm46@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 422
  • Office Hours: Wednesday 1-3pm
Dan Plesch
Dan Plesch

Applied International Relations, weapons of mass destruction, diplomacy, globalisation and corporate accountability, globalisation and democracy, globalisation and energy, the role of international non-governmental organisations, the United Nations and the Nazis.

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4841
  • Email: dp27@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 4417
  • Office Hours: By appointment
Parvathi Raman
Parvathi Raman
The Indian Community in South Africa; Politics and identity in South Africa; African and Asian Communities in Britain; Political and cultural issues in Diaspora Studies; Historical anthropology; Philosophical issues in anthropology.
Marie Rodet
Marie Rodet

Modern West African history, especially social and gender history of Western Mali, history of West African slavery and emancipation.

  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4606
  • Email: mr28@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 309
  • Office Hours: Tuesday, 11am-1pm
Subir Sinha
Subir Sinha
South Asia: institutions of development, NGOs, social movements; the environment, common property institutions and resource use
  • Tel: +44(0) 20 7898 4495
  • Email: ss61@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 287
  • Office Hours: Mon. 11 - 1
Charles R H Tripp
Charles Tripp

Middle East: states and ideologies, war, Islamic political thought

  • Tel: 020 7898 4748
  • Email: ct2@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 214
  • Office Hours: Wednesdays 10- 12
Justin Watkins
Justin Watkins

Burmese languages and Burmese linguistics; language policy in Burma; experimental and acoustic phonetics; computer lexicography; minority languages of South East Asia; Mon-Khmer and Tibeto Burman languages; tone languages. Sign languages in Burma and South East Asia.

  • Tel: 020 7898 4254
  • Email: jw2@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: 462
  • Office Hours: Thursday 11-1. Email for an appointment.
Lynn Welchman
Staff Silhouette
Islamic law; law of the Middle East and North Africa, especially comparative family law; human rights; gender and law, Palestine and the law
  • Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4672
  • Email: lw10@soas.ac.uk
  • Room: S235
  • Office Hours: Thursday 10:30 - 12:30
Cosimo Zene
Cosimo Zene

Anthropology of religion, theory in the study of religions, continental philosophy, Gramsci and religion, intercultural and inter-religious dialogue, minorities (Dalits), mysticism and heresy, non-Western Christianities, Mediterranean anthropology; South-Asia (India, Bangladesh), Sardinia, world philosophies.

Administration

Other Staff