Recent Awards
Professor Martha Mundy| has been awarded one of the 2011 Student Union's Teaching Excellence Awards. The Union "sought teachers who inspired students to use what they had learnt in the classroom to think about the world differently". Martha's work as a tutor and supervisor, with students at different stages in their student careers who have worked with her over some years, was commended for "demonstrating the practical application of her academic expertise and motivating students to do the same".
Dr Fenella Cannell| was awarded the ASA-C-SAP National Award for Excellence in Teaching Anthropology, 2010-11. Details about her entry can be viewed here.|
Professor Martha Mundy| has been awarded £6,640 from the British Academy. The research will analyse recent transformations in the political economy of the agriculture sector in the wake of the oil boom.
Professor Martha Mundy| received £99,000 from the Royal Society. The funds form the Newton International Fellowship for Mr Ronald Jennings (who participates in our MSc Law, Anthropology and Society programme interdisciplinary research seminars).
Dr Matthew Engelke| has been awarded £76,952 from the ESRC. He is conducting an in-depth anthropological study of the British Humanist Association.
Dr Heonik Kwon has been awarded £802,276 from the Academy of Korean Studies. The AKS award will fund a laboratory for Korean Studies for five years on the theme of 'Beyond the Korean War', an international, interdisciplinary research on local and global histories and meanings of the Korean War.
Student Prize Winners
Katie Huston was awarded the 2009/10 Maurice Freedman prize for the best MSc Social Anthropology dissertation. Her dissertation is entitled "Citizenship re-extended? AIDS policy, biomedicine and marginalisation in South Africa".
Tim McLellan was awarded the 2009/10 Isaac Schapera prize for the best MSc Law, Anthropology & Society dissertation. His dissertation is entitled "Welfare exploitation, identity and (mis)recognition in contemporary Australia".
Natalia Buitron Arias was awarded the 2009/10 Edvard Westermarck prize for the best MSc Anthropology of Learning & Cognition dissertation. Her dissertation is entitled "Children's Understanding of Supernatural Illness: A Discussion of an Ethnography of Ecuadorian Illness in Light of Developmental Research".
Nicolas Ferminet was awarded the 2009/10 Lucy Mair prize for the best MSc Anthropology and Development dissertation. His dissertation is entitled "Moral Spheres and Islamic Finance: From universal values to local acculturation and mutual recognition".
Melvin Sanborn was awarded the 2009/10 Fei Xiaotong prize for the best MSc China in Comparative Perspective dissertation. His dissertation is entitled "A Chosen Trauma: Comparing Victim Narratives in China and Japan".
Gillian Mann was awarded the Firth Prize for "Being, Becoming and Unbecoming a Congolese Refugee in Dar es Salaam" which was the best paper presented by a research student the Anthropology Department's Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory in 2009/10.
Meadhbh McIvor (BA Anthropology and Law) was awarded the department's Jean la Fontaine Prize in 2009/10 for her outstanding performance in her degree overall as she obtained a first in all 9 of the units which counted towards her degree classification.
Philip Proudfoot (BA Social Anthropology) and Nicholas Winnett (BA Social Anthropology) shared the department's Michael Sallnow Prize for the best Special Essay in 2009/10.
Congratulations to them all!
Professor Anjan Ghosh
It is with great sadness that we report the sudden death of Professor Anjan Ghosh in Kolkata on June 5 2010. Anjan Ghosh was both a public intellectual and social scientist who was widely know among South Asianists. He worked at the Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences (CSSSC), Kolkata for most of his life. He was an exemplary combination of academic and activist who was also well known for his kindness to young scholars.
Obituary| (written by Laura Bear|)
Professor Martha Mundy honoured by Harvard University for her co-authored book Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is pleased to sponsor the exploratory seminar "Towards a New Agenda for Multi-disciplinary Research on Modern Middle Eastern History," which will be led by Roger Owen, A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern History at Harvard University, and Beshara Doumani, Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. It begins on Friday morning, May 14, 2010 and concludes after dinner on Saturday, May 15th.
The seminar leaders have described the purpose of the seminar as follows:
"The aim of the exploratory seminar is to bring together a group of international scholars to discuss the many academic and methodological implications of Martha Mundy|'s new book, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria, I.B. Tauris (2007). This path-breaking work, which has been two decades in the making, provides, for the first time, a detailed and archive-based account of the way in which the Ottoman government attempted to provide individual title to the lands famed by certain villages in what is now the northern district of Trans-Jordan. The subject of land registration, although written about quite extensively in general, has never been treated either with such a level of theoretical sophistication or in such a local-specific way before. Not the least of its many virtues is the way it presents a way of thinking about the development of Middle Eastern rural property relations in a way that should be instantly recognizable to the peoples of the region themselves."