I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), University of Oxford, working on the project “Education-as-development”: Minorities and state education in western China. I am based at the Oxford China Centre, and I am an associate member of St Antony’s College.
I hold an MA from the School of International Development, University of East Anglia (2010), and a PhD from the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield (2019), thanks to an ESRC PhD studentship. My doctoral thesis – Governing social change in Amdo: Tibetans in the era of compulsory education and school consolidation (2019) – was based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork. It was the winner of the 2021 British Association for Chinese Studies’ Best Doctoral Thesis Prize.
After completing my PhD, I worked for a few months on a Modern Tibetan Studies Program (twentieth anniversary) project at Columbia University. I then spent several years (August 2019–December 2021) teaching courses in sociocultural anthropology, visual anthropology, international development, social theory, and sociocultural change in western China, at Brooklyn College and City College of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Between my MA and PhD, I spent a year doing qualitative data analysis work for an International Development UEA project on HIV/AIDS in Uganda, contributing to a WHO report and collaborating on two peer-reviewed articles. Prior to academic studies, I spent much of the 2000s working for NGOs and charities concerned with social issues in the UK as well as development, cultural, and education projects in Tibet, India, and Nepal. Meanwhile, my first book, a social history of American air crews based in England during World War Two, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press (2004, second edition 2008).
This website is a project (or two) ‘in progress’, reflecting my academic and non-academic interests, professional and personal work, words and images, and perhaps somewhat chaotic as a consequence. It should become more coherent in time (or it might become two separate sites). Meanwhile, I am trying to pursue a sense of ‘imperfectionism’ and spontaneity, for a change...
Interests: Tibet; China; Nepal; anthropology of education; anthropology of development; visual anthropology; sonic ethnography.