Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings

University of Bristol

Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8
T: 0117 954 6070   W: www.bristol.ac.uk

The Department of Archaeology and Anthropology forms, as from 2006, part of the School of Arts within the Arts Faculty. At present, we teach anthropology at Masters and PhD level, as well as running a popular undergraduate single honours degree in Archaeology and Anthropology.

Staff

Permanent members of social anthropology staff are three: Fiona Bowie, David Shankland and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. In 2008, we have also benefited greatly from part-time teaching from Michaela Benson, Rohit Barot, Will Guy, Judith Okely, Isabel de Sallis and Emily Warmsley.

Staff interests overlap, as one would expect in an integrated department, so that anthropology in a wider sense is represented by Mhairi Gibson and Kate Robson-Brown who teach biological anthropology, and João Zilhão who teaches early humankind.

As an academic unit we cover three of the four traditional anthropological fields, with a total permanent teaching staff of 16.5 posts. Anthropologists at Bristol but not actually based in our department include Helen Lambert, Rachael Gooberman-Hill, Vieda Skultans, and Katharine Charsley, whom we are pleased to welcome to the University's Sociology Department as full-time lecturer.

Research

Africa, Latin America, south-east Europe, and the ethnography of the Islamic world are gradually emerging as regional specialisations in social anthropology, together with a focus on current changes within the discipline, and links with Archaeology. In 2009, we held the ASA conference 'Anthropological and Archaeological Imaginations: past, present and future' at Bristol, kindly supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which had some 400 delegates. For further information on this event, please see http://www.theasa.org/conferences/asa09/.

Teaching

Our single honours Archaeology and Anthropology degree forms the main undergraduate component of our teaching, with an MA in Social Anthropology and research supervision for PhDs the postgraduate.

Full-time teaching staff

Fiona Bowie (DPhil, Oxford; Senior Lecturer in Anthropology) Anthropology of religion, adoption, kinship and ethnography; sub-Saharan Africa

David Shankland (PhD, Cambridge; Reader in Social Anthropology and Head of Anthropology) Islam, religion, history of social anthropology, interface between archaeology and anthropology; Turkey and south-east Europe

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (PhD, London; Senior Lecturer in Anthropology) Environmental anthropology, stereotypes and ethnicity, culture and performance; south-east Europe, Latin America

Anthropologists elsewhere in the university

Katharine Charsley (PhD, Edinburgh; Lecturer in Sociology) marriage, migration, south-east Asia, Pakistan)

Rachael Gooberman-Hill (PhD, Edinburgh; Research Fellow) Medical anthropology, pain, ageing, UK, kinship, work, mobility, health services, applied anthropology

Helen Lambert (DPhil, Oxford; Senior Lecturer in Medical Anthropology) Medical anthropology, perceptions of illness and health-seeking behaviour, lay perceptions of risk; South Asia

Vieda Skultans (PhD, Wales; Professor of Social Anthropology), Medical anthropology, narrative theory, social memory; Latvia, ex-Soviet Union, India.