Contributors
Jon Bialecki is a continuing lecturer in the University of California San Diego Department of Anthropology; he has previously taught at Reed College and the University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement, is a study of the miraculous and differentiation in American religion, with a focus on ethics, politics, language, and economic practices; it was awarded the 2017 Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society and Honorable Mention for the 2018 Clifford Geertz Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. A second book, Machines for Making Gods: Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Worlds without End, addresses religious transhumanism.
Matei Candea is professor of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Corsican Fragments and Comparison in Anthropology. His website is www
Joanna Cook is a reader in anthropology at University College London. She is the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life and Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health, Metacognition and Governance in the Twenty-First Century.
Sarah Green is professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki. She has spent her academic career studying issues of space, place, location, and borders, starting with research on safe space among radical and revolutionary feminist separatists in London. She moved on to study the reopening of the Greek-Albanian border following the end of the Cold War; and to look at the introduction of internet and digital technologies to Manchester. More recently, she has studied how diverse borders and locations overlap in the Mediterranean region, for a European Research Council Advanced Grant project she leads called Crosslocations. She is currently working on the regulation of cross-border livestock trade, the cross-border tracking of wild animals, and attempts to control the spread of animal-borne infectious disease. The aim of that work is to stretch understanding of border dynamics and location to more than human mobility.
Paolo Heywood is assistant professor of social anthropology at the University of Durham. Before this he was a junior research fellow in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees. He is the author of After Difference and of a number of contributions to debates over anthropology’s “ontological turn.”
Tanya M. Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor at Stanford University, in the Anthropology Department (and Psychology, by courtesy) Her work focuses on the anthropology of mind and the way different representations of mind affect spiritual and psychiatric experience—in particular, the voices of spirit and the voices of madness. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. She is the author of Of Two Minds, Our Most Troubling Madness, How God Becomes Real, and other books, and she is currently at work on a book entitled Voices.
Jonathan Mair is currently visiting researcher in the Department of Applied Communication Studies at the Complutense University, Madrid. His research has focused on ethics and cultures of belief and knowledge, and it has been based on fieldwork among Buddhist groups in northern China, Taiwan, and Europe.
Nigel Rapport is emeritus professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews and founding director of the St. Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held a Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice. His most recent books are Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture and (as editor) Anthropology and the Enlightenment: Moral Relations Then and Now. His current work centers on Emmanuel Levinas and how his philosophy might align with anthropological science.
Adam Reed is a reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. He conducts research in Papua New Guinea and the United Kingdom and is the author of Papua New Guinea’s Last Place: Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison and Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: A Study of the Henry Williamson Society. As well as continuing to work with an English literary society, his most recent UK project centers on animal activism.
Gildas Salmon is a CNRS research fellow at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Études sur les Réflexivités (LIER-FYT). His work focuses on the philosophy and history of social sciences. After a first project devoted to French and American anthropology in the twentieth century, he is now working on a genealogy of comparative sciences within the framework of the British Empire. He has published Les Structures de l’esprit: Lévi-Strauss et les mythes and edited Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology (with Pierre Charbonnier and Peter Skafish) and La Dette souveraine: Économie politique et État (with Julia Christ).
Richard Staley is a historian of the physical sciences—broadly construed—who has developed a project on “physicist anthropologies” by examining the cultural history of mechanics and relations between a small group of physicists and anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who bridged two disciplines often defined in part by the contrast between them. He holds professorships at both the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen and has recently helped lead a Mellon Sawyer Seminar titled “Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power.” In addition to studies of the history of economic anthropology, he is currently engaged in the collaborative Leverhulme Trust–funded project Making Climate History, examining the relations between making and knowing in the climate sciences over the past two hundred years.
Thomas Yarrow is a professor in social anthropology at Durham University. His research mostly focuses on expert knowledge, built space, and heritage, sometimes in conjunction. His books include The Object of Conservation and Architects.