Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
Durham University
Anthropology Department, Durham University, Dawson Building, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/
Departmental report
The department conducts research in both biological and social areas of the discipline and places a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity. Reflecting this interdisciplinary research strategy, three of the department’s four research groups bridge the bio-social boundary. In 2008-9 we were awarded £20k in seed corn funding to establish a Centre for the Co-evolution of Biology and Culture, involving collaborations across research groups and with other departments, such as Psychology. We sustain a broad range and high quality of international research in four principal fields: Anthropology in Development, Medical Anthropology, Evolutionary Anthropology and Public Culture. Each group holds regular seminars including both talks by external researchers, and internal seminars at which speakers obtain feedback on research plans, draft papers and grant applications. We run five taught masters degrees, four of which are sponsored by one of our research groups (Social Anthropology, Development Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and Evolutionary Anthropology) and one of which cuts across the research groups (Research Methods).
The department moved to join the Department of Archaeology in a single building on the University’s science site in September 2008, reflecting the growing collaboration between the two departments. We teach and research at two sites: Durham City and Queen’s Campus (Stockton). Our research infrastructure includes laboratories for informatics, sleep research, hormones and reproductive ecology, visual anthropology and genetics. The department hosts editorial offices for Social Science & Medicine: Medical Anthropology (Professor Catherine Panter-Brick), History & Anthropology (Dr Paul Sant Cassia and Dr Steve Lyon), and International Journal of Primatology (Dr Jo Setchell).
Research income has been rising steadily to its current level of around £1million per annum. Recent awards include ‘The Children of Ephraim: Constructing Jewish Identity in Andhra Pradesh’ (AHRC, Dr Yulia Egorova), ‘Reconsidering detachment: building an exploratory network’ (ESRC Dr Matt Candea), ‘Contraband and Counterfeit Tobacco (MRC, Dr Andrew Russell), ‘Indigenous Studies and Engaged Anthropology’ (British Academy, Dr Serena Heckler), ‘Child Mobility: Moving Forward’ (Leverhulme Trust, Dr Kate Hampshire, Social Diversity and Origins (AHRC, Dr Alex Bentley), ‘Pigs, People and the Neothilisation of Europe’ ( NERC, Dr Una Vidarsdottir)
The Department’s postgraduate community has continued to grow at a high rate, currently with 57 research students and between six and twelve students on each of our five taught masters programmes. Research students are funded by ESRC, MRC, NERC, In the last year we have significantly enhanced our training, funding and infrastructure support for postgraduates. Our Postgraduate Annual conference is now a large event attended by the whole department, with prizes awarded for the best student talks and posters. Details of these and other postgraduate support can be found in our monthly postgraduate newsletter: (http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/postgraduate/pgnewsletter/).
Academic/teaching staff
Professor Helen Ball: Behaviour and physiology of infant sleep; bed-sharing, night-time parenting; human reproduction; evolutionary perspectives on parenting
Professor Robert Barton (Head of Department): Behavioural ecology; primate evolution and behaviour; evolutionary neuroscience and comparative studies of brain size and structure; evolution of sleep; evolution of mammalian reproductive strategies; evolution of colour signals and ritual uses of colour
Dr Alex Bentley: Popular culture change, fashions, copying and imitation behaviours, evolutionary theory, applications of population genetics to culture change; anthropology and archaeology of early agricultural societies, relations between hunter-gatherers and farmers, prehistoric marital resicence, demographic models of the prehistoric spread of agriculture, Neolithic Europe, Neolithic Thailand
Prof Gillian Bentley: Evolutionary medicine, fertility, early life effects on reproductive function
Dr Sandra Bell: Religion, British Isles, Western Himalaya, Buddhism, gender, communication, access to higher education, social construction of the environment
Prof Alan Bilsborough: Human evolution, especially the functional basis for cranial diversity in early hominids and the reconstruction of evolutionary patterns. The interaction of social and biological variables in human biology, with particular reference to patterns of nutrition and disease.
Dr Trudi Buck: morphometrics, cranial diversity, early human migrations & dispersal
Dr Ben Campbell: Himalayas, non-capitalist agriculture and social relations, kinship and household theory; development, environmental relations and nature protection, indigenous knowledge, animals and people; public understanding of science, racial hierarchy and ethnicity, and food
Prof Michael Carrithers: Sri Lanka, India; Buddhism, Jainism; evolution of social intelligence; narrative as a form of social and cultural understanding; historicity; Germany; theories of interaction, dialogism and mutualism, activity theory
Dr Susana Carro-Ripalda: Personhood, emotions, and relatedness, Gender, Agency, and Empowerment, Personal micro-processes in global contexts, Pain, suffering, and dynamics of psychological well-being, Children's experiences of migration
Dr Peter Collins: Britain; Kenya; religion, narrative; qualitative research methods; development; tourism; organisations; space and place
Dr Matt Candea: regionalism; education; racism; multiculturalism, universalism, and related theories of culture and society; the media; epistemology; and the theory and practice of anthropological fieldwork
Dr Iain Edgar: Imagination and dreaming; welfare and community care; humanistic groupwork in research and teaching
Dr Yulia Egorova: relationship between biosciences and culture; impact of genetic anthropology on historical debate
Dr Emma Gilberthorpe: Kinship and gender in post-colonial Papua New Guinea; long-term impact of short-term industry on indigenous livelihoods; Ethnographic film and knowledge transfer
Dr Kate Hampshire: Africa; Sahel; pastoralists; nomads, migrants and other mobile populations; demography; human ecology; livelihood strategies and security; health and disease
Dr Tom Henfrey: Anthropology of development, Environmental Anthropology, energy and society
Dr Russell Hill: Mammalian evolution and behaviour; primate social behaviour and the determinants of group size and composition; predation risk and primate behaviour
Dr Mark Jamieson: kinship, economy, political processes, ritual, belief and language amongst peoples pf Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast; 'the social life' of counterfeits and reproductions; anthropological approaches to art, prestige valuables, money, exchange technologies and sorcery
Dr Jeremy Kendal: Gene-culture co-evolution and human niche construction
Dr Rachel Kendal: Social learning and cultural traditions in animals
Dr Elizabeth Kirtsoglou: Gender, performativity, politics, power, consumption, gay communities, nationalism, ethnicity, identity; Greece, Honduras
Dr Kristin (Fire) Kovarovic: Environmental change in East Africa and its influences on major events in human evolutionary history, methods of palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, ecomorphology, faunal community ecology
Prof Robert Layton: Anthropology and archaeology of art in non-literate societies; social change, especially among French peasants and Australian Aborigines; evolution of social behaviour; indigenous land rights
Dr Stephen Lyon: Legal and political anthropology, conflict negotiation, e-science and information technologies, Islamist politics; Pakistan; Turkey
Dr Claudia Merli: Medical anthropology, Reproductive health, Thailand, Muslim minority in Thailand, Female genital cutting, Male circumcision, Ethnopsychiatry, Culture-bound syndromes
Dr Catherine Panter-Brick: Human ecology and adaptability; growth, diet, disease and subsistence work patterns; maternal and child health; well-being; street-children; Nepal, Ethiopia and Arabia
Dr Tessa Pollard: Evolutionary medicine; stress; modernisation, lifestyle and cardiovascular disease; early environment and health; variation in reproductive function
Dr Jan de Ruiter: Primate sexual strategies and their evolution, basis of behaviour polymorphisms in primates, population genetics
Dr Andrew Russell: Perceptions and use of environment, medical anthropology, especially reproduction and contraception, cross-cultural education, migration, applied anthropology and development; Nepal
Dr Paul Sant Cassia: Anthropology of Mediterranean societies; family, household, marriage and property in Greece and Malta; art and commoditisation; political anthropology; resistance movements, kinship and politics
Dr Jo Setchell: primate behaviour and sexual selection, socio-ecology, conservation
Prof Paul Sillitoe: Development and social change; indigenous knowledge and participation development; environmental anthropology and natural resources management; livelihood and technology; Melanesia and South Asia
Dr Bob Simpson: Sri Lanka, ritual tradition and performance, kinship, divorce and relationship breakdown in Western societies. New reproductive and genetic technologies in the developing world
Dr Malcolm Smith: Current patterns of human evolution, inferred from genetic studies of British populations and predicted from historical demography; interfaces between human biology and history
Dr Jamie Tehrani: The evolution and transmission of tradition, The phylogenetic analysis of culture, The spread of rug-weaving in Western and Central Asia, Tattooing and body ornamentation across cultures, Folk tale traditions and evolution
Dr Una Strand Vidarsdottir: Development of modern human shape variation (hard tissues); human evolution and migration; carniofacial growth; particularly the use of Geometric morphometric techniques to study changes in craniofacial form during ontogeny
