About us
Faculty
Dr David Pratten
University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Africa
Dr Pratten completed his PhD and British Academy Post-doctoral research fellowship in Anthropology from SOAS, University of London under the supervision of JDY Peel. He previously taught at Edinburgh, SOAS and Sussex. Dr Pratten has conducted research in Sudan, Mali and Ethiopia and has worked for over a decade in south-eastern Nigeria. The themes of his research concern historical memory and relations between state and society. He has been developing this focus in relation to an historical ethnography of colonialism, and in his current research which examines youth, insecurity and violence in post-colonial Nigeria.
david.pratten@sant.ox.ac.uk
Dr Julie Archambault
Departmental Lecturer in African Anthropology
Julie Soleil Archambault specialises in African anthropology with a particular interest in the recent uptake of information and communication technologies. She received her PhD in anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (2010). Based on an ethnography of mobile phone use in the city of Inhambane, Southern Mozambique, her doctoral research examined everyday secrecy practices in relation to the redefinition of gender and intergenerational relations underway in the post-socialist postwar economy. Julie has also conducted research on alcohol consumption and the expansion of religious movements in Southern Africa. This reflects her broader interest in lifestyle aspirations and everyday experiences of young people living in contexts of uncertainty. Her current research focuses on the workings of the petty crime economy in Southern Mozambique.
julie.archambault@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Dr Iain Walker
Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology
Iain Walker holds a PhD in Anthropology from Sydney. He has worked in the Indian Ocean for more than twenty years where his research interests have focused on identity and ethnicity, expanding to include migration, globalisation and notions of home and belonging, as well as age systems. He carried out doctoral research on mimesis, custom and belonging in the Comorian island of Ngazidja; his post-doctoral research has taken him to the Comoros, Zanzibar and Hadramawt and he is now working on perceptions of belonging among mobile communities of East Africa, the Arabian peninsula and western Europe.
iain.walker@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Professor David Zeitlyn
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Research interests: Ethnographic studies in Cameroon and Nigerian middle belt; religion, politics; photography, mobile phones and the internet.
Multiple history (histories): connecting archaeological, oral and genetic histories.
david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Africanist Anthropologists at Oxford
Dr Chris Morton
Head of Photographs and Manuscripts, Pitt Rivers Museum
Chris Morton curates the photograph and manuscript collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum - the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and world archaeology. He is also Career Development Fellow at the Museum and an Adjunct Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has a background in history and socio-cultural anthropology, and carried out my doctoral fieldwork on building practices in the landscape/taskscape in Botswana. Currently his research is solely focused on the history of photography within anthropology, archives and visual studies more broadly. He has been carrying out research on the field photography of E. E. Evans-Pritchard since 2003.
christopher.morton@prm.ox.ac.uk
Dr David Mills
University Lecturer in Pedagogy and the Social Sciences, Kellogg College
David Mills read for a PhD in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies having carried out fieldwork in Uganda. His research draws on anthropology and history to develop historically-informed accounts of the social sciences, their pedagogies, and their relationship to universities and the state. His political history of social anthropology "Difficult Folk" is forthcoming in early 2008 with Berghahn publishers. Recent co-edited books include "Teaching Rites and Wrongs: Universities and the making of Anthropology" (C-SAP, Birmingham), "The Anthropology of Time" (Berg, Oxford) and "African Anthropologies: History, Practice and Critique"(Zed, London).
david.mills@education.ox.ac.uk
Post-Doctoral Researchers
Dr Judith Scheele
Junior Research Fellow, Magdalen College
judith.scheele@magd.ox.ac.uk
Judith Scheele completed her DPhil in social anthropology at Oxford and is now a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College. Her doctoral research focused on notions of knowledge, political legitimacy and community in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking area in north-eastern Algeria. Current research investigates trans-Saharan connections of all kinds, including legal and illegal trade, migration, and scholarly links, with particular emphasis on southern Algeria and northern Mali. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in both countries. Her publications include Village Matters: knowledge, politics and local identity in Kabylia (James Currey 2009), and various related book chapters and articles.
Dr Chris Low
chris.low@africa.ox.ac.uk
Chris Low's current research concerns how the environment influences medical ideas and practices amongst Khoekhoe and San groups in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. His work combines anthropological study with oral history, archival research and analysis of Rock art. His most recent publications include: Chris Low and Elisabeth Hsu (eds), ‘Wind, Life, Health: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives’, JRAI vol. 13, Special Issue (2007), and his monograph: Khoisan Medicine in History and Practice , Research in Khoisan Studies Volume 20, (Koln, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2008).
Dr Neil Carrier
neil.carrier@africa.ox.ac.uk
Neil is currently working alongside David Anderson on a number of projects. These relate both to his earlier research on the commodity 'khat', and his more recent collaboration with Sloan Mahone and David Anderson on the AHRC-funded project 'Trauma and Personhood in Late Colonial Kenya', examining the photographic collection of the late Edward Margetts, head of Mathari Hospital, Nairobi, in the 1950s. Fieldwork on the latter project has involved trips to Kenya and Zanzibar, tracing the histories behind many of the photographs. Neil is working on a number of articles (both historical and anthropological) based on this research, as well as collaborating with Sloan Mahone on exhibiting the photographs in Kenya and the UK. His interest in the anthropology and history of stimulants and intoxicants remains strong, and he is writing further pieces exploring questions of agency and substance use, drugs as commodities, and the history of attempts to prohibit such substances. Further interests include the ethnography of East Africa (especially Kenya), the workings of transnational trade networks, and films of the 1950s and 1960s featuring East Africa. Dr Carrier has also collaborated with the Pitt Rivers Museum on digitising a collection of photographs and negatives recently donated by Paul Baxter who conducted pioneering fieldwork in northern Kenya in the early 1950s. His monograph Kenyan Khat: The Social life of a stimulant was published by Brill in 2007.
Doctoral Students
Oliver Owen
Policing in Nigeria
Ana Margerida Santos
Violence and ethnicity in post-conflict Mozambique
Marco Di Nunzio
Youth and politics in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Kelly Rosenthal
Political culture, South Africa
Lesley Fesenmyer
Life-cycle rituals of Kenyans living in the UK
Kate Kingsbury
Youth and Conversion: Mouride brotherhoods in Senegal
Michelle Osborn
Chieftaincy and politics in Nairobi, Kenya
Elizabeth Cooper
Children and care in Kenya
Tara Kelly
Medicines, plants and healing in Cameroon
Adam Gilbertson
AIDS and Livelihoods, Kenya
Kate Fayers-Kerr
Mursi Body Art and Ecology, Ethiopia
Tilmann Heil
Conviviality and Migration in the Casamance, Senegal, and Catalonia, Spain
Visiting Research Associates
Joël Noret (Université Libre Bruxelles), 2007-08
Joël spent the 2007-08 academic year affiliated to ISCA under an exchange programme between the University of Oxford and the Université Libre de Bruxelles which is sponsored by Fondation Philippe Wiener - Maurice Anspach. His research is based on extensive fieldwork in Benin where he has worked on a number of topics including death, memory and masquerade. His co-edited volume ‘The Living and the Dead in Africa’ (with Michael Jindra) is in press.
Töne Sommerfelt (University of Oslo), 2007
Töne spent 6 weeks in Oxford in 2007 working on her project “Shares and Sharing: Dynamics of exchange, identity, rank and power in a Gambian town”.
Benjamin Rubbers (Université Libre Bruxelles), 2006-07
Benjamin conducted post-doctoral research at Oxford based on fieldwork he conducted in Katanga, Congo. His work focuses on informal economics and the social world of European capitalism. Benjamin spent the 2006-07 academic year affiliated to ISCA under an exchange programme between the University of Oxford and the Université Libre de Bruxelles which is sponsored by Fondation Philippe Wiener - Maurice Anspach.
