Dr Helen Watson
- Fellow and Director of Studies, St John's College
Contact
About
I studied Anthropology at the Queen's University of Belfast and was a PhD student at Girton College, Cambridge. I have been a Fellow of St John’s College from 1990 and was appointed University Lecturer in Social Anthropology from 1991 to 1999. I am currently a Lecturer, Teaching Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology in St John’s and have served as a Tutor, Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology and the Undergraduate Admissions Tutor.
Research
Research interests
- Religion and conflict
- Gender
- Migration and development
- Experiences of exile and political-religious conflict (Egypt; France; Ireland)
Helen supervises students in all three years of the Tripos in Social Anthropology. Her teaching at Part II covers the Anthropology of Politics, Ritual and Religion, Production and Reproduction and Cognition, Knowledge and Belief.
Helen has undertaken fieldwork research in Egypt, Morocco, France and Ireland and is particularly interested in the relationship between ethnography, life history and experience. Her doctorate, Migration, Money and Marriage, was based on fieldwork in an informal squatter settlement in Cairo. Her ethnography, Women in the City of the Dead, is based on autobiographical narratives and accounts of everyday life collected during fieldwork in Egypt. She has written on inter-communal violence, sexual harassment, the ‘new’ veiling and marital conflict, radical religion and spirit possession in marginal Arab- Muslim communities and migration and identity. On-going research interests relate to perceptions of diaspora and the transmission of identity. Current research plans involve exploring the relationship between memory and belief in religious experience.