Professor Harri Englund

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Churchill College
  • Professor of Social Anthropology
  • Director of Postgraduate Education and Chair, PhD Committee
  • Fellow, Churchill College
  • Office hours: appointment by email
Professor Harri Englund

Contact

About

I am a social anthropologist who studies obligations, rights and justice in their vernacular forms. This has involved field and archival research in various religious, economic, legal, and political contexts in Africa as well as on African-European relations.

I was awarded a PhD in social anthropology by the University of Manchester in 1995 and held research fellowships at the Nordic Africa Institute and the Academy of Finland before joining the University of Cambridge in 2004. I served as the Director of the University’s Centre of African Studies in 2013-17 and was elected into the British Academy in 2019.

Research

Research interests

  • Central and Southern Africa
  • Northern Europe
  • Colonialism; humanitarianism and human rights
  • African-language political and moral thought
  • Mass mediation; radio and voice
  • Historical anthropology
  • Biography
  • Political and moral economy

I began my research in Africa in the early 1990s when a wave of democratisation swept across the continent. This formative period sparked my enduring interest in topics such as liberal reformism, democracy, human rights, moral obligation, freedom, and equality. Studying these topics in their vernacular forms has involved fieldwork with refugees, smallholder farmers, human rights activists, slum dwellers, local politicians, Pentecostal Christians, radio journalists, and spoken-word poets.  A key thread running through my work with these diverse people has been the question of what might be learned about apparently universal issues such as human rights, freedom, obligation, and equality if approached from their perspectives rather than those of canonical texts and thinkers. It has been based on a decades-long commitment to work through an African language (Chichewa / Chinyanja).

In recent years, I have increasingly turned my attention to history in pursuit of related themes. A Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship proved a catalyst by enabling me to immerse in archival work. The bulk of that project concerned the linguistic, spiritual, and humanitarian work done by nineteenth-century Scottish missionaries in present-day Malawi. A central finding was the vision for racial equality that David Clement Scott was developing at a time when the British colonial occupation and Cecil Rhodes’s commercial interests were taking the region to another direction entirely. My intent is to continue researching such little-known figures in colonial and imperial history and their perspectives on race relations and humanity. I am currently developing a project on encounters between Finns and Africans at the turn of the twentieth century.

I am a co-editor of the International African Library, a book series published by Cambridge University Press for the International African Institute.

Research Projects 

 

Publications

Authored books

Edited works

Articles

Book chapters

Teaching and supervision