Emeritus professors

I am a founding editor of History Workshop Journal; and am on the scientific committee of Quest/Cost EU ‘Who cares in Europe?’, the advisory board of Psychoanalysis and History, and the Advisory of the Raphael Samuel Centre, Birkbeck University of London.

A selection of published work is listed on Goldsmiths' Research Online.

Professor Besson has served on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and as chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK, of which she is a founder member (1977) and (since 2010) an elected Honorary Life Member.

She was a founding co-editor of the journal Progress in Development Studies (London: Arnold) and continues as a Life Member of the PIDs Advisory Board. She has been an advisor to the Scottish Executive on census issues of ethnicity (2007) and a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum for the Exhibition ‘Breaking the Chains’ (2007-2009) commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade.

See her full profile and list of publications.

Professor Caplan was one of the founding members of the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths. She taught in the department from 1977-2002, as well as at other universities in the UK, USA, Canada and South Africa.

Her interests have included gender and social inequality; food, health and risk; reflexivity and anthropological ethics; social justice and human rights; personal narratives and biography. Fieldwork has been carried out on Mafia Island, Tanzania since 1965; Chennai (Madras) since 1974, and West Wales since 1992

See her full profile and list of publications.

She is Executive Editor of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, past-Chair of the Sociology of Religion study group within the British Sociological Association, a member of the ESRC Peer Review College, and past Trustee of the Sociological Review. She also serves as a Member, Office for National Statistics, on census questions regarding Ethnicity, Identity, Language and Religion.

View her full profile

I am conducting research until 2022 on a Wellcome Trust medical humanities project 'People Like You.' I am also preparing a monograph, Rendering Houses, about Ladakhi biographies and work as a Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health at Imperial College, London where I am seconded 2 days a week.

I studied social anthropology at Cambridge University, Stanford University, Ca., and the London School of Economic and Political Sciences, where my PhD explored spirit possession in Ladakh, North India.

I was awarded the Eileen Basker Prize and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems for my 2007 monograph, On the Game: Women and Sex Work (London: Pluto Press).

See her full profile and list of publications.

She works on memory politics, transitional justice, nationalism, state disintegration and international intervention, with a focus on former Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav region.

She has provided expertise on the post-Yugoslav region to various non-academic stakeholders, including the Foreign Office, non-governmental organizations in the UK and the Western Balkans, the Royal Court Theatre, the International Commission on the Balkans, and British and international media outlets. She has held visiting fellowships at the London School of Economics and School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. She co-edits the Palgrave book series on Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. She is currently writing a book about truth commission initiatives, nation-building and memory politics in the post-conflict Balkans.

See Professor Dragovic-Soso's research output on Goldsmiths Research Online

Michael’s work circles his principal intellectual interest, social theory, and his principal geographic archive, China.

Holding a joint professorship with the Faculty of Literature at Beijing Capital Normal University Dutton's work circles around his principle of intellectual interest (social theory) and his principle geographic archive, China. Increasingly the distinction between archive and interest, however, has become blurred. 

His earliest major work, Policing and Punishment in China (Cambridge UP 1992), explored the way various Chinese governments disciplined the subject, while his second major work, Streetlife China (1998 Cambridge UP) looked at the popular responses to governmental disciplining. His third book, Policing Chinese Politics (Duke UP 2005) —for which he won the 2007  Levenson Award for the best book on modern China from American Asian Studies Association— explored the underlying dynamic propelling the Maoist revolution while his last book, Beijing Time (Harvard UP), co-authored with former students, revealed another sometimes hidden side to life in the Chinese capital.

In his forthcoming book, Dutton explores the concept of the political but once again he does so in a way that highlights certain characteristics that Chinese history helps reveal. Arguing for art rather than a science of the political, Dutton’s work offers a more liquid and affective understanding of the political. 

See Professor Michael Dutton's research output on Goldsmiths Research Online

Kiran is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Socioloigy. 

See her research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online. 

Professor Goddard has worked in the fields of economic and political anthropology, with a particular emphasis on gender and class. A critical perspective on work and labour links her early research on outwork, factories and families in Naples (Gender, Family and Work in Naples, Oxford: Berg, 1996) with her current work as part of an interdisciplinary team that is researching work, skills and models of development in the steel industry (MEDEA – Models and their effects on Development Paths). A very different perspective is explored through her current writing on the work of the political and the production of alternative publics in Argentina.

See her full profile and list of publications.

Emma's previous projects include research on young homeless people and urban space, and comparative research on the middle classes in Paris and London.

Emma's research is driven by a series of questions about how people make a place for themselves in and across places. What shapes, enables and limits these spatial practices? How do these practices intersect with other forms of power, control, histories to produce spaces? How do everyday spatial practices impact on a person’s sense of self?

See her research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online. 

She is interested in cities, having done research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul. She is currently the Director of the British Academy’s Cities and Infrastructure Programme, which comprises a portfolio of 18 multi-disciplinary projects delivering, with local partners, vital improvements in infrastructure in cities in the global south.

Author of many books and papers, she specialises in visual, spatial and biographical methods, often working with photographers and artists, most recently with Michael Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), and Douglas Harper (Duquesne University, Pittsburg). Caroline is the author of Flip-Flop: a journey through globalisation’s backroads, published by Pluto Press in 2014 and in Brazil in Portuguese in 2018 as Nas Trilhas De Um Chinelo. The accompanying website can be found at www.flipfloptrail.com. She is co-author, with Douglas Harper, of Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys, published (2009) by the University of Chicago Press.

Caroline holds a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship Serious Money: a Mobile Investigation of Plutocratic London. She recently worked with Ho Wing Chung, at the City University Hong Kong, on an ESRC project, ‘What calculations and Strategies Drive Young Migrants? An Investigation of the Traffic between London, Hong Kong and Beijing’, and with Roger Burrows, Rowland Atkinson, Tim Butler and Mike Savage on ‘The Very Affluent Worker: A Study of Everyday Life in the Alpha Territory’.

Her research focuses on the theoretical, methodological and ethical implications of recent developments in the sciences of animal cognition and behaviour for social science thinking (i.e. for the kinds of concepts and theories deployed in the social sciences; for the relations of animals to social science teaching and research; etc.).

Professor Brian Morris carried out field work among the hunter-gatherer people in South India, about whom he subsequently published a book. He has published books on the anthropology of religion, conceptions of the self and on herbalism in Malawi.

In addition, he has also written numerous articles on ethnobotany, ethnozoology, classification, conceptions of the individual, religion, ritual and symbolism, hunter-gatherer societies, herbalism and fungi. He has also carried out fieldwork on a number of occasions in Malawi, most recently researching human-insect interactions.

See his full profile and list of publications.

Her research theorises human agency and participation in everyday life especially in the experiences of marginalised social groups. I am interested in the ways in which agency, or lack thereof, is lived and experienced in everyday life across cultures and historical periods.

See her research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Dr Frances Pine has been conducting research in eastern Europe for the past 3 decades. Her field work has been located in the Polish Tatra Mountains, the countryside of eastern and central Poland, and the cities of Lublin and Lodz.

She has worked on kinship and gender, place, history and memory, work, markets, informal economy, unemployment and restructuring, and migration and emerging inequalities.

See her full profile and list of publications.

She is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology. 

See her research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Evelyn was PI of an ERC funded project, Peopling Europe: How data make a people (ARITHMUS; 2014-20). She is Founding and Editor-in-Chief of the SAGE open access journal, Big Data & Society, ranked in 2021 as the top journal (1/110; IF 5.987) in the Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary Journal Citation Reports.  Recent books are Data Practices: Making up a European People (co-edited with Stephan Scheel)(2021); Being Digital Citizens, 2^nd Edition (co-authored with Engin Isin) (2020); and Data Politics (co-edited with Didier Bigo and Engin Isin) (2019).  

Evelyn’s publications can be found on Goldsmiths Research Online.

He has a keen interest in early American Pragmatism, radical pluralism, ecological humanities and more-than-human worlds, speculative and empirical philosophy, postcolonial thought, religious and non-secular practices, the art of life, and the history and philosophy of the human sciences.

He is the author of two monographs: The Adventure of Relevance (Palgrave Macmillan, with a foreword by Isabelle Stengers) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (forthcoming). He has co-edited Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures (Routledge), and guest-edited Isabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy (SubStance, 2018) and Problematizing the Problematic (Theory, Culture & Society, forthcoming).

Martin is a Founding Member of the Association for Process Thought.

See his research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online.

David Silverman is also Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane and Visiting Professor in the Management Department at King's College, University of London and the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney. He has authored 15 books and 45 journal articles on qualitative research, ethnography and conversation analysis.

Teaching

David pioneered a taught MA in Qualitative Research at Goldsmiths in 1985 and supervised around 30 successful PhD students. Since becoming Emeritus Professor in 1999, he has continued publishing methodology books. David has also run workshops for research students in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.

Besides all this, David's other interests include classical music, literary fiction, bridge, county cricket and spending time with his grandchildren.

Vik's research interests are Social theory and philosophy; Marxism and critical theory; moral theory; masculinity and sexual politics. The body and emotional life; ecology and social theory; holocaust and modernity, psychoanalysing psychotherapy; identity and ethnicities. Men and feminism; sociology of knowledge; morality and social theory; equality and liberal theory.  

Vic has published widely.

See Vic's research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Emma Tarlo has conducted long term anthropological fieldwork in India and Britain as well as shorter multi-cited fieldwork in China, Myanmar and the USA. She specialises in the anthropology of material culture with reference to dress, fashion, textiles, the body and hair in trans-cultural contexts.

She is also interested in urban anthropology and the relationship between history and anthropology. Her work engages with issues of colonialism, nationalism, diasporic identities, aesthetics, memory, religious revivalism, stigma, creativity and questions of representation and materiality. She is particularly interested in the relationship between visual, material and narrative forms and in developing new modes of ethnographic writing and exhibition making.

See her full profile and list of publications.

He studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research, University College Dublin and the University of Warwick, from which he received his PhD in 2003.

He is the author of three monographs: The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010), and (with Jeff Kinkle) Cartographies of the Absolute (2015). He edited The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics with Lorenzo Chiesa, and has translated several works by Alain Badiou, as well as Antonio Negri, Furio Jesi and Franco Fortini.

See his research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online.