Anthropology PhDs: where are they now?
Judith Bovensiepen has been awarded a one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Judith’s research is on East Timor, and she plans to publish parts of her thesis as articles and/or a book. Following her fellowship, Judith will work as a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Kent University.
Maxim Bolt joined the British Museum's 'Money in Africa' research project, for which he has conducted new research in Malawi, Uganda and Nigeria. In January 2012, he will begin a Lectureship in African Anthropology at the University of Birmingham
Katie Dow has been awarded the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she will be taking up for one year at the University of Edinburgh. During her fellowship Katie will be developing a publication record on the ethics of surrogacy (based on fieldwork she carried out for her PhD in rural Scotland), as well as attending conferences and undertaking some teaching on the ‘kinship’ course.
Tom Widger has also been awarded the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which he will undertake for 12 months (from January 2011) in the Department of Social Anthropology at Brunel University. Tom’s research is entitled 'Suicidal behaviour in a globalising context: exploring changing causalities and moralities of self-harm in Sri Lanka and comparative settings.' During his fellowship he will work on several publications, including turning his PhD thesis into a book and co-editing a volume of papers on the anthropology of suicide with Dr James Staples.
Elizabeth Hull is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research in Agriculture and Health in the SOAS Food Studies Centre. Her position runs until 2012, with her current research focusing on agricultural production, livelihoods and indebtedness among farmers, and the impact of these upon foodways and nutrition in South Africa.
Fraser McNeill has been appointed as Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Amit Desai is now a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department at Queen’s University, Belfast, on the HERA-funded project ‘Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement’, conducting fieldwork with temple architects, sculptors, and artists in Tamil Nadu, India.
Student Prize Winners
Christopher Bell (BSc Social Anthropology) has been awarded the department's Michael Sallnow Prize for obtaining the highest mark in the third year Special Essay in 2010/11.
Kimberly Chong won the 2010/1 Firth Prize for "Implementing Strategy, Reengineering Culture: Management Consulting and The Project of Modernisation in post-Mao China" which was the best paper presented by a research student the Anthropology Department's Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory. The committee praised the standard of all the papers presented by our research students in 2010/1.
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."