Who we are

Helena Tuzinska lectures in the Department of Ethnology and Museology, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. Best-known for her work in assisting refugees, she is a long-standing member of the Radical Anthropology Group.

Helga Vierich lived with Kua hunter-gatherers of Botswana for the better part of two and a half years and then went on to do a further six months in a drought consultancy that included them while Botswana went through the worst drought of its history in 1979. Richard Lee was her thesis supervisor.

Hilary Callan has been Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland since 2000. From 1993 to 2000 she was Director of the European Association for International Education, based in Amsterdam. An anthropologist by training and graduate of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford), she has held academic appointments at…

Ian Watts gained his PhD in 1998 from the University of London with a thesis on the southern African Middle Stone Age ochre record and modern human origins. In addition to his archaeological work on ochre and pigment use, Ian has published widely on African hunter-gatherer cosmology and gender ritual. He is currently completing his…

Ifi Amadiume is Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. She did her fieldwork among the Igbo in Nigeria in Africa with a special interest in gender analysis and gained her Ph.D. at the University of London (School of Oriental & African Studies) in 1984. Her research interests include African goddesses and matriarchy; spirit…

Dr Ivan Tacey is a lecturer in Anthropology and Criminology at the University of Plymouth. His research interests include hunter-gatherers, animism, environmental relations, globalization, place making, and violence. His long-term research with Batek hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia explored how interconnectivity, environmental change and socio-political marginalization have led to realignments of these indigenous peoples’ animistic practices…

Jackie Walker is a black, Jewish activist and author, a founding member of Jewish Voice for Labour, a defender of Palestinian rights, a longstanding campaigner against racism and the former Vice-Chair of Momentum, the left-wing movement in the British Labour Party. Author of the acclaimed family memoir Pilgrim State (Sceptre, 2008), she has recently staged…

Jacob Fishel is a performing artist residing in New York City.  A graduate of The Juilliard School, he has performed on and off Broadway and on stages across the United States.  In 2013, he was the recipient of the Linda Gross Playing Shakespeare Award from the New York Shakespeare Society.

James Woodburn is the world’s leading theorist on egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies; he has just returned from visiting the Hadza people of Tanzania.

Jason Wilcox is an English Literature graduate who went on to do an M.A. by Independent Study in Anthropology and Film at the University of East London after attending Chris Knight’s “Human Revolution” evening class, where his special project was published as a pamphlet under the title “Civilization, Repression and the Modern Horror Film”. Subsequently…

Jean-Louis Dessalles is Associate Professor at Telecom Paristech. His research focuses on the quest for fundamental principles underlying the language faculty and its biological origins. He is particularly interested in the study of narrative relevance, argumentative relevance and the conditions that make honest communication among selfish agents possible. He has authored several books, including Why…

Jeffrey Miley is Lecturer of Political Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University. His research interests include comparative nationalisms, language politics, the politics of migration, religion and politics, regime types, and democratic theory.

Jerome Lewis is a specialist on Central Africa and hunter-gatherer societies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) with Yaka forest hunter-gatherers and to a lesser extent with neighbouring farming peoples. His research is a continuing long-term ethnographic study focused on Yaka social organisation, religion and ritual structures, child development and…

João Zilhão is professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Bristol, Dept of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 1998, he directed the salvage excavation of the Early Upper Paleolithic child burial of Lagar Velho (Portugal) and, in 2004-2005, the archaeological excavations at the Peştera cu Oase (Romania), site of Europe’s earliest modern humans. Ongoing projects…

Professor Joe Cain is Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology in UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies.

John Bonnett is an Associate Professor of History at Brock University. A Tier II Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities from 2005-2015, John is a digital historian with a specialist in 3D modelling. He has experience using multiple approaches to generate 3D content for heritage reconstruction, including 3D modelling software, photogrammetry, and 3D scanning applications.

John Grigsby is a Lecturer in the fields of history, archaeology and mythology, and author of Beowulf & Grendel: The Truth Behind England’s Oldest Legend (2005). He received his Ph.D on ‘Skyscapes, Landscapes and the Drama of Proto-indo-European Myth’ from Bournemouth University in 2018.

From 1974 to 2000, Jonathan Benthall was Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He was the Founding Editor of Anthropology Today, editing the journal from 1985 to 2000; today he is Director Emeritus. He is currently studying Faith Based Organizations with special reference to Islamic charities and has been retained by a number of legal…

Jonathan Chadwick is Director of Az Theatre. He is a founder member of Paddington Arts, a former Artistic Director of the Vanguard Company at the Crucible, Theatre Foundry, Meeting Ground.and Associate Director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East London. He wrote and directed for Foco Novo and directed for 7.84, the Glasgow Citizens’ and the…

Julien d’Huy, of the Pantheon–Sorbonne University in Paris, is pioneering the use of evolutionary theory and computer modeling to compare and analyze magical myths and folktales.

Kate Prendergast gained her Ph.D in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. She has published in British Archaeological Reports, Archaeopress, 3rd Stone and Science & Spirit magazine. Her research interests include explorations of prehistoric and indigenous cosmologies and the role of ritual in social continuity and change. She currently works as a Researcher in African…

Born in Utqiaġvik, Alaska and raised on the Kenai Peninsula, Kathleen Bryson received her PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from UCL in 2017, and previously was awarded her MA in Independent Film from what is now UAL, with two BA degrees in Anthropology and Swedish, respectively, from the University of Washington. She additionally studied a year…

Kathy Garlow (left) and Mary Sandy are representatives from the Six Nations on the Grand River community in Ontario, Canada. Their primary concern is to help defend their community against colonisation and develop international links in the struggle for indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee have been living as a Confederacy of nations organised by direct consensual…

Lauren Gawne is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Linguistics at SOAS, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. She is interested in documenting and analysing how people speak and gesture. Lauren’s research focuses specifically on speakers of Tibetic varieties in Nepal, but she is interested in gesture across different cultures. Lauren blogs about language…

Les Levidow is a Senior Research Fellow at the Open University with a special interest in controversial agricultural technologies, especially agbiotech and bioenergy, as well as alternatives to agri-industrial systems. He edits the journal Science as Culture, which critically analyses the underlying frameworks, assumptions and terms of reference of science and its impact on modern…

Lionel Sims is retired head of Anthropology, International Politics, International Development and Refugee Studies at the University of East London and retired Vice President of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture. For the last thirty years I have been conducting research into prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury, prehistoric Basque culture and European…

Liz Henty is Honorary Research Fellow at the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, United Kingdom. She is co-editor of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, and has recently edited ‘Solarizing the Moon, essays in honour of Lionel Sims’ (with Fabio Silva)

Louise Raw is an activist historian; and thinks all historians should be.

Luc Steels is a professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB), director of the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His scientific research interests cover the entire AI field, including natural language, vision, robot behaviour, learning, cognitive architecture and knowledge representation. His current research…

Lucy Cooke is a Zoologist, National Geographic explorer, TED talker, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning documentary filmmaker and presenter. She is author of ‘Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal’.

Malvika Gupta is a D.Phil. candidate in the international development department at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis focuses on Indigenous politics, statehood, and intercultural education in Ecuador and India. She has worked on the issue of Indigenous education in India as a practitioner and researcher, and has published several articles on it. Her…

Marcus Coates is a well-known British performance artist whose work explores what it means to be human by getting into the skin of rabbits, badgers and other nonhuman personalities. Under his influence, humans in ordinary settings can be seen and heard metamorphosing into songbirds. An exhibitor at the London Tate Modern, Coates was a shortlisted…

Marek Kohn is a science writer on evolution, biology and society. His first two books were on drugs, their cultural history, and their politics. He is the author of seven books and hundreds of articles. He holds an undergraduate degree in neurobiology from the University of Sussex, a PhD from the University of Brighton and…

Margaret Clegg has a degree in Behavioural Science, a Masters and PhD in Biological Anthropology. Her own research includes work on the evolution of human growth particularly at adolescence and the evolution of speech through investigation of anatomical markers such as the hyoid bone. Margaret has taught and researched Biological Anthropology at UCL, UCN and…

Marisa Carnesky is a magical performance artist. Inspired by the ideas of anthropologists Camilla Power and Chris Knight, her experimental research focuses on the ritual, emotional and other conditions necessary if women are to synchronise their menstrual cycles. She has recently completed a practice based PHD at Middlesex University, London.

Mark Dyble is a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in Biological Anthropology. His research focuses on the evolution of both human and non-human social systems and their relationship with reproduction, kinship, cooperation, and conflict. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork with a community of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines and, more recently,…

Mark Jamieson is a social anthropologist currently working as a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. He has been conducting fieldwork and working with Miskitu-speaking people for twenty-nine years studying kinship, gender, domestic organisation, language, political processes, economy, language, ritual, land rights and the contraband narcotics trade. Besides his work in Nicaragua, which has included some research…

Mark G. Thomas is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. In 2009 – in collaboration with Prof Stephen Shennan and Dr Adam Powell – Thomas published a study in the journal Science showing that population density and or migratory activity are likely to be…

Martin Holbraad’s main field research is in Cuba. There, he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and revolutionary politics. Having completed in 2002 his doctoral thesis on the role of oracles and money within the diviner cult of Ifà in socialist Cuba, his research since has focused on such topics as the relationship between myth and action,…

Martin Richards studies variation in gene frequencies to reconstruct the routes taken by our distant palaeolithic ancestors as they dispersed out of Africa to settle in Asia and Europe between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago. With Hans-Jürgen Bandelt and Vincent Macaulay, he co-edited ‘Mitochondrial DNA and the Evolution of Homo Sapiens’ (Springer-Verlag, 2006).

Mary McPherson is a daughter, sister, auntie, and a mixed Anishinaabe member of Couchiching First Nation in Northwestern Ontario, where her family is from. She grew up in Thunder Bay, working as a visual artist in the community while pursuing her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts and Indigenous Learning at Lakehead University. She has since…

Matt Pope is Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.

Based in the Department of Anthropology at Sussex University, Matthew Doyle is conducting fieldwork in Bolivia with a special focus on political activism and indigenous rights.

Megan Biesele received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1975. A member of the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, her doctoral thesis was titled “Folklore and Ritual of !Kung Hunter-Gatherers”. After initial fieldwork she made 25 more trips to the Kalahari over the next 48 years, working in land rights, mother-tongue education, and language…

Michael (Mike) Makwa Auksi Has completed Dissertation at McGill University. Toronto-born, Anishinaabe-Estonian who studied at University of Toronto and Ryerson University.  Bear Clan member and a Band member of the Lac Seul FN. Currently studying Indigenous ice hockey histories, community-based participatory sport, and wellness programming.  Qualifications for the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics with Team Estonia represented his…

Michal Uhrin is a postgraduate student in Social Anthropology at the University of Comenius, Bratislava, Slovakia.

Milan Rai is a longstanding anti-war activist and writer. He is the author of several books including Chomsky’s Politics (Verso, 1995), the only monograph on the subject, and 7/7: The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War (Pluto, 2006). He has been co-editor of Peace News since 2007.

Monica Janowski is a social anthropologist who has been carrying out research in Sarawak for more than 30 years. Her research interests focus on indigenous cosmology and the relationship between humans and the natural environment. She has recently completed a one-year research fellowship at the Sarawak Museum assisting in planning the content of galleries in…

Morgan Feeney-Beaton is a long-standing member of the Radical Anthropology Group. She has recently conducted postgraduate research at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David on cosmic aspects of spinning and weaving.