PhD Students

This is a partial list of the graduate research students working in Social Anthropology in Cambridge.

Megha Amrith (Wolfson; msa41 [at] cam.ac.uk) conducted fieldwork in Singapore and the Philippines on the everyday lives of Filipino migrant medical workers. She is interested primarily in the anthropology of migration and diaspora, including transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Research interests also include debates about care and care labour.

Eirini Avramopoulou (Sidney Sussex; ea [298] cam.ac.uk) worked with feminist, LGBT and religious women activist groups in Istanbul, Turkey. She is currently writing a thesis on issues emerging out of this gendered trialogue and relating her ethnography to theories of human rights, feminism, queer belonging, (post)secularism, affect and subjectivity.

Alice von Bieberstein (adr31 [at] cam.ac.uk) spent time in Berlin and Istanbul trying to make sense of the struggles over confronting, which includes giving a name to, the annihilation and expulsion of Armenians from Anatolia during the final days of the Ottoman Empire (1915-1916). Primarily she is interested in the politics of history and the role played by practices and discourses of ‘coming to terms with the past’ in contemporary configurations of Europe. Other related and relevant questions concern state-minority relations, nationalism and the anthropology of violence; migration and diaspora; memory, subjectivity and temporality; denial, reconciliation and forgiveness.

Ela Drazkiewicz (Pembroke; email: edrazkiewicz [at] gmail.com) conducted her fieldwork in South Sudan and Poland among various development experts representing NGOs, international institutions and governmental bodues. Her research involves studies of development practicies and ideology as well as politics and interrelations between various actors of the international assistance networks. Her research interests also includes studies of the state and civil society as well as organisational life.

Delwar Hussain (King’s, email: dh368 [at] cam.ac.uk) is interested in the contemporary realities of South Asia. He has carried out fieldwork on the India/Bangladesh border.

Sergio Jarillo de la Torre (Darwin College; email: sj323 [at] cam.ac.uk) conducted fieldwork in Melanesia, in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. His interest is in material culture and the relations between art, identity, religion and politics.

Jessica Johnson (Pembroke; jaj38 [at] cam.ac.uk) conducted fieldwork in rural Southern Malawi. Her research interests include: matrilineality, gender, marital dispute resolution, customary law, female initiation, and HIV in the era of anti-retroviral therapies.

Mantas Kvedaravicius (Sidney Sussex; email: mk561 [at] cam.ac.uk) His research currently circles around the notion of truth; in particular, it inquires into the different moments of everyday life in Chechnya: confessions acquired in torture, divinations of clairvoyants, hopes about the disappeared, conspiracy narratives, court procedures, and dreams, to see how they overlap, contact, and contest, and importantly how they bear upon the truth and the political in this unstable place.

Vito Laterza (email: vl238 [at] cam.ac.uk) conducted field research in Swaziland, in an ex-mining town recently bought and redeveloped by a group of Christian missionaries. His research interests include: interactions between consciousness and the material environment; cosmology and belief; religion and development; rural and urban; genre and narrative in anthropology; African literature and social science; Swaziland; Southern Africa.

Michal Murawski (King’s; email: gmm37 [at] cam.ac.uk) is writing about the relationship between the Palace of Culture and Science, a 231-metre high Stalinist skyscraper which dominates central Warsaw, and the contemporary city. He is particularly interested in examining whether and how non-human, material entities like buildings and streets, as well as allegedly abstract, intangible entities like history, memory and the economy, possess the capacity to exert an autonomous impact on the field of relations between Warsaw and the Palace.

Chloe Nahum-Claudel (Kings College; email: cn253 [at] cam.ac.uk) conducted fieldwork among the Enawene Nawe of Central Brazil (Southern Amazon) where cooking, zoology, spirits, gossip, humour and illness occupied her everyday. Current research foci are political economy, ritual, kinship, gender and mythology. She is interested in ethnological comparison within the Amazon region and between Amazonian and Melanesian cosmologies.

Felix Ringel (Sidney Sussex College; fr247 [at] cam.ac.uk) has conducted fieldwork in Hoyerswerda, Germany’s fastest shrinking town. He is interested in issues of temporality, materiality, and sociality in the context of drastic economic and demographic change. One special focus of his work is the role of art, hope, and the future in times beyond post-socialism.