Dr Joe Ellis
- Affiliated Lecturer
- Deputy Senior Tutor & Fellow, Hughes Hall
- Director of Studies, Gonville & Caius College and Hughes Hall
- Course Director, Institute of Continuing Education
- Office hours: appointment by email
Contact
About
Joe Ellis is an Affiliated Lecturer in the department and Deputy Senior Tutor (Teaching and Outreach) at Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
He enrolled as a mature student onto a BSc degree in Anthropology at University College London (UCL) in 2009. After graduating, and completing a further MRes Degree, he came to Cambridge in 2013 to do a PhD in Social Anthropology based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mongolia. Joe taught anthropology and social theory extensively prior, during and after his PhD and has since held academic, pastoral and teaching positions throughout the collegiate university.
Research
Joe’s research is founded upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mongolia, particularly in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar and the more remote provinces of Khovd and Bayan-Ölgii in the far west of the country. The overarching theme of his research interests is the manner in which cosmological, political and moral concepts come to impinge upon social life in Mongolia. This has led him to work on a range of topics, including: the dynamics of violence, shamanism, and alcoholism within intimate relations; the role of mythic-historical exemplars in generating ideas of ‘ethnic’ difference and tension; the impact of religious practices on the economic sphere; the cultivation of gendered mobilities within kinship ideologies; practices of deception and spheres of complicity; and the political salience of perceptions of environmental change.
More recently Joe has begun working with the Kazakh minority population who live in the Altai mountains on the borders of Mongolia, Russia, China and Kazakhstan. He is particularly interested in the transnational connections between the Kazakh diaspora in this region, and the ways it provides a window into political developments within and between ‘great power’ nation states in Central Asia and beyond.
In addition, Joe is in the process of developing research on adult learners and their progression to Higher Education in the UK. He is particularly interested in the potential barriers that adult learners face and the wider educational and societal inequalities that they reveal.
Teaching and supervision
Undergraduate Teaching
Lecturing
- SAN1 – Social Anthropology: The comparative perspective (Witchcraft as Politics)
- SAN3 – Anthropological theory and methods (Marxism, Material Culture, Ontological Turn)
- SAN4 - The anthropology of an ethnographic area (Religious Revivals, Gender & Kinship in Inner Asia)
- SAN6 - Power, economy and social transformation (Cosmological Transformations)
- SAN9 – Science and environment (Moral environments)
- A4 – Being Human: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Symbolism, Department of Archaeology)
Supervision
- Supervision of all SAN papers and dissertation
Postgraduate Teaching
- MPhil Paper 2 - Systems of knowledge and power (Anthropology of Religion)
- MPhil Paper 4 - Theory, methods and enquiry in Social Anthropology (Modes of enquiry)
- MPhil Dissertation workshop