UCL Anthropology

Christopher Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at UCL has been awarded the Padma Shri on the occasion of Republic Day by the Government of India.

Beatriz Aragon, a first year PhD student in the department, has been awarded a 2-year doctoral researcher position with stipend at the Max Planck Institute for the study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. The award will help fund her PhD research about Roma minority and their interactions with healthcare services in Madrid.

Original call for application available on the UCL Human Resources webpage.

Professor Volker Sommer has been honoured with an invitation to perform at this year's Ig Nobel UK show - under the time-honoured motto "Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK".

UCL ran its 2012/13 Graduate School Research Poster Competition on 25th and 26th February. The event is intended to enable graduate students to advertise their innovative research. Overall, 247 posters were displayed in the North & South Cloisters.

The Anthropology department is delighted to announce that it will be awarding a number of Mary Douglas Awards, collectively worth £32,000, to students applying for our Master’s programmes for entry in September 2013.  These fee waivers, worth between £1000 -£ 4000 pounds depending on the programme, will be available across all eight of the masters programmes and will be awarded based on the merit of individual applications. 

The start of the academic year 2012/13 has been hugely positive for staff and students alike. We were joined by four new members of staff, all of them appointed to entirely new posts. This is the best indication that our Department is thriving, able to provide a hugely vibrant atmosphere that assures excellence in teaching and learning. Newly appointed in the second quarter of last academic year were also three members of the administrative team, enabling us to provide the very best service to our students and support to our staff.

Continuing her work on the anthropology of food, Dr Kaori O’Connor appeared 11^th September on the Great British Bake-Off programme, the popularity of which reveals a growing interest in baking by men, talking about American pies and food as identity. She will shortly be appearing on the Hairy Bikers series discussing eggs in traditional British cuisine, and in the Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner series with Clarissa Dickson-Wright, speaking on the history and cultural significance of breakfast cereals.

Research carried out by Dr David Lawson from UCL Anthropology in collaboration with Dr Anna Goodman (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Professor Ilona Koupil (Centre for Health Equity Studies, Stockholm) has been reported in the media, including articles in the Economist and New Scientist. Their research published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, tests current theories of why, as human populations get richer, do they start having less children?

A two day International Event at Anthropology Department, UCL on 6th to 7th November 2012

previewEthnographic Terminalia seeks submissions for Audible Observatories, an exhibition to be held in San Francisco in November 2012. Artist-researchers, collaborators, anthropologists and other scholars working in art are encouraged to submit their proposals prior to July 15, 2012.

Congratulations to Joshua Lipworth and Megan Laws (3rd Year Anthropology) who have won the world’s largest student film festival, the Campus MovieFest, leading to their film also being shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festivals Short Film Prize.

The academic year 2011/12 has been hugely positive for staff and students alike. The year started with four new lecturers joining us and it has ended with a further four new staff appointments who will join us at the start of the new academic year. Three of these new appointments are entirely new posts, a fact that is the best indication that our Department is thriving, able to provide a hugely vibrant atmosphere that assures excellence in teaching and learning. Newly appointed were also three members of the administrative team, enabling us to provide the very best service to our students and support to our staff.

Professor Volker Sommer of the Department of Anthropology has been awarded the North of England Zoological Society's highest honour, the Gold Medal, for outstanding lifetime achievement in the fields of natural science, conservation and the environment. Previous recipients have included Sir David Attenborough, Dame Jane Goodall and Dr Richard Leakey. The ceremony is to be held on 06 June at Chester Zoo.

Date: Monday 11 June 2012 from 9.30am
Venue: UCL Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW

Department of Anthropology, University College London
Tuesday, 12 June 2012, from 10:00 to 17:30
Conference Schedule
Conference Abstracts
Conference Poster

Please note the following studentship is only available to current UCL Anthropology students.

The Department of Anthropology invites applications for one MRes Studentship (£5,500 towards fees plus £12,000 p.a. stipend)  available from September 2012.

Ruth Mace, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology in UCL Anthropology, took part in a panel discussion at The Royal Society on ‘What it means to be human’.

Wednesday Afternoons (2pm-5pm), 2nd- 30th May, 2012.

Do you ever visit museums and feel that you lack the specialist knowledge, skills and experience to critically analyse and evaluate ethnographic objects and displays? This training course, run by the UCL Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies, is designed to provide the skills necessary to do this.

CERTAINTY?

Organised by UCL and University of East London in collaboration with Brunel University, SOAS, Goldsmiths and LSE, the conference is now calling for panel proposals and individual papers.

Dr Kaori O'Connor, a Senior Research Fellow in UCL Anthropology, has been awarded the Pasold Prize 2011, for the best paper published in Textile History in 2011, for her paper entitled:

There is a vacancy in the department for a Research Associate in Anthropology (Ref:1237707).

This is a 6 month full time post-doctoral research position to work on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Ancestry, Admixture and Breast Cancer in Brazil: an ethnographic investigation of population genetics, disease risk and identity’.

Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) Research Group - Launched at Citizen Cyber Science Summit 2012. UCL Anthropology’s collaboration with UCL Engineering officially launched at the Royal Geographic Society on February 16^th. Watch talks from leading figures exploring the possibilities of citizen cyber science. The Launch is reported in Nature . Read about it on Andrea Wiggins blog. There a range of reports on talks at http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/

There is a vacancy in the department for a Lectureship in Quantitative Methods in Anthropology (Ref:1234295).

Anthropology PhD student Jane Dickson wins the top prize for Best Hack at the recent the London Green Hackathon.