News on Cambridge Anthropology

William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology:

The Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology has great pleasure in announcing the election of Professor Henrietta Moore to the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology. Professor Moore will take up her appointment on October 1st, 2008. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Culture and Globalization Project, at the London School of Economics. For three years (2002-05) she was the Deputy Director at the LSE. Professor Moore’s very distinguished research career encompasses anthropology and psychoanalysis, anthropological theory and cultural analysis, culture and globalization, and gender, sexuality and social change. She has conducted research in East, Central and West Africa, Europe and India. The Department is greatly looking forward to welcoming her to Cambridge and to working closely with her in the years to come.

Professor Moore succeeds Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, who was elected to the William Wyse Chair in 1993. In this her retirement year, the Department wishes to express its deep and abiding appreciation to Dame Marilyn for the unfailing dedication, collegiality and scholarly leadership she has provided over the last 15 years, and to pay tribute as well to the unique contribution she has made to anthropology both in the UK and worldwide.

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.