Who we are

Morna Finnegan gained her first degree in Women Studies at University of East London. She went on to pursue a Ph.D in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University, completing her thesis on women’s political position among egalitarian hunter-gatherers in Central Africa in 2009. Authored texts The Political Is Personal: Eros, Ritual Dialogue, And The Speaking Body…

Nurit Bird-David is Professor in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Haifa in Israel, and past president of the Israeli Anthropological Association. Her PhD in Social Anthropology is from Cambridge University. She was a graduate of Trinity College, and research fellow in New Hall. Her major specialization is in hunter-gatherer studies, doing fieldwork with a…

Paul Powlesland is a rights of Nature and climate activist, barrister and River guardian.

Paula Sheppard is a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Pauline von Hellermann is an environmental anthropologist and political ecologist, who came to Anthropology via History and Development Studies. After completing her PhD at Sussex in 2005 and two postdocs at Sussex and York, she joined Goldsmiths as a lecturer in 2011. She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2018-2021) for the project Red Gold:…

Raj Puri is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Anthropology, University of Kent, Director of the Centre for Biocultural Diversity and Course Convenor of MSc Ethnobotany

Professor Rajko Muršič is a specialist in urban anthropology and especially the anthropology of popular music. His fieldwork has been conducted in Slovenia, Poland, Macedonia and Japan. He is a member of Sensotra, a European Research Council-funded project at the University of Eastern Finland.

Rebecca Sear is a demographer, anthropologist and human behavioural ecologist, and uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand human behaviour. In particular, she is keen to promote a greater understanding of evolutionary explanations for human behaviour in the social and health sciences. Rebecca works on questions of demographic and public health interest, including fertility, child health…

Rebekah Plueckhahn has researched and worked in Mongolia since 2006 and completed her PhD at the Australian National University in 2013. Having trained in anthropology and ethnomusicology, Rebekah’s doctoral research drew from ethnography conducted in western Mongolia’s Hovd Province on performance, music, value, and perceptions of the future. Since 2014, she has been working as…

Associate Professor of Landscape History, University of Leicester.

Richard Seaford is emeritus professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. His work on Athenian tragedy and religion has led him to investigate the historical conditions for the radical development of Greek culture in the sixth century BC (sometimes called the origin of European culture), and to argue that a crucial factor in…

Robin Halpin has been an active member of the Radical Anthropology Group for ten years since returning to London after a career in Vienna and Thessaloniki as an EFL teacher specialising in adult learners in business and academia. He was born in London in 1955 and read Philosophy and Economics at UCL. He is currently…

I am visiting Endowed Chair of Women and Gender Studies and Visiting Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College, New York. I am a product of Brooklyn’s public schools, legendary dance halls, and radical political culture rooted in places like Medgar Evers Community College. My parents came to New York from Guyana in the 1970s.

Roger Blench is an anthropologist and linguist, working as a consultant on sociological aspects of rural development. His other interests include archaeology and ethnomusicology. He has conducted fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and most recently the Brazilian Amazon. He is currently Chief Research Officer of the Kay Williamson Educational Foundation and an academic visitor…

Rosalyn Bold is currently a Research Associate at the Center for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAOS), University College London.

Sergey Gavrilets is a mathematical modeller interested in the dynamics of sexual conflict and the origins and evolution of distinctively human cognition, kinship and social organisation.

Sheina Lew-Levy holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Shivani Kaul is a research student in the department of anthropology at UCL and in psychodynamic-systemic training at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. She is interested in the psychological impacts of neoliberalization, with fieldwork in north India, eastern Bhutan, and England. Her present research integrates her interdisciplinary training in political science, South Asia studies,…

Prof Sian Sullivan an environmental anthropologist, cultural geographer and political ecologist concerned to better understand diversity in cultural understandings and representations of the natural world, amidst concern over climate change and species decline. She is particularly interested in intersections and frictions between cultural, natural history and economic values as these relate to beyond-human natures.

Simon Pirani is the author of “Burning Up: A global history of fossil fuel consumption” (forthcoming in 2018 from Pluto Press). He is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Simone Pika lectures in evolutionary anthropology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manchester. She wrote her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, in collaboration with the Department of Ethology, University of Münster, Germany. Her research centres on the evolutionary roots of language by pinpointing similarities and differences in…

Sophie Redlin is a General Practitioner, Mental Health trainer and Masters student in Medical Anthropology at UCL. She is also an aspiring documentary filmmaker and to date has received training from George Chan, BBC Filmmaker and specialist in health and science documentary, and through the Raindance Academy.

Stephen Lyon has lived and worked in Pakistani Punjabi villages and cities off and on since 1982 and has carried out longitudinal research in the same northern Punjabi village for more than 20 years. His research integrates social network analysis, context coding, narrative thick description, and different varieties of quantitative and audiovisual data to address…

Biologist interested in botany and biodiversity.  -Visiting Professor in Ecology and Environmental Sciences at University of Bedfordshire, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences, The Open University; Science Expedition Leader with the British Exploring Society BA Natural Sciences Cambridge; MSC Biodiversity and Conservation, Trinity UC D; PhD from Trinity College Dublin, PCSE Science (Biology) Cambridge; Extensive Boating…

Tam Burn Dean is an actor, cultural producer and activist currently based in Glasgow. He has taken part in a wide range of activities about Robert Burns over the years, not least as singer of the Burnsian band The Bum-Clocks https://vimeo.com/374426738 https://thebum-clocks. bandcamp.com/track/tree-o-liberty.

Tamara Turner is a final-year PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at King’s College London where she specializes in the Sufi-related musics of North Africa and others considered within popular Islam. Her current PhD research is the first ethnomusicological study of the Algerian ritual and music called diwan. Tamara’s research is funded by King’s College London, the…

Thea Skaanes is Managing Curator of the UNESCO collections at the Moesgaard Museum, Denmark. The author of many scientific papers, she has conducted extensive field research into the material culture, social life and cosmology of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Her writing and lecturing has been described as ‘dripping from blood, taboo, darkness, ancestors and…

Valentina Zagaria is a post-doctoral fellow at the Central European University (CEU) as part of the Striking from the Margins team and an associate fellow of the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. She is currently carrying out fieldwork on the intimately political aspects of Libyan women’s lives while in long-term or intermittent…

Dr. Vivek Venkataraman is a biological anthropologist at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the ecology and energetics of human foraging strategies. His main ethnographic fieldwork is conducted among the Orang Asli populations of Peninsular Malaysia. He is the co-director of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project (www.orangaslihealth.org).

Volker Sommer is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at UCL. His research focuses on the evolution of social behaviour, cognition, biodiversity conservation and animal rights. He conducts long-term field studies on monkeys and apes in the jungles of Asia and Africa. Sommer is on the scientific board of the Giordano-Bruno-Foundation, a German-based think-tank for the promotion…

Wendy James is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford and past President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She has carried out research in several countries of N.E. Africa, especially the Sudan (where she also taught in the University of Khartoum) and Ethiopia. Trained in Oxford, she has pursued long-standing interests in social anthropology,…

Yasmine Musharbash is Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. She has been conducting participant observation-based research in central Australia since the mid-1990s. Her work is broadly concerned with everyday relations, and she has explored this by focussing on embodiments and the emotions (studying grief, boredom, sleep, the…