I am an anthropologist. I have spent my career learning about how other people see the world, and taking some pains to describe their experiences as faithfully as I am able through descriptive accounts.

 

Anthropology’s methodological strength is long-term immersive fieldwork, a mode of research designed to provide insight into the lived, embodied, and experiential aspects of people’s lives. Anthropology rarely produces data that could be analyzed through statistical methods; instead, it generates rich portraits of the ways in which people see the world, how they understand themselves and what matters to them. It is through ‘telling stories’, providing in-depth qualitative accounts, about people and their lives that we can understand how people navigate what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld refers to elegantly as ‘the vicissitudes of life’. My work is motivated by passionate curiosity about how perennial existential experiences are shaped by culture and I try to represent anthropology at its traditional best: I am a field worker with the primary skill of immersing myself in worlds and describing them vividly.

 

My research has been taken up in disciplines as diverse as Buddhist Studies, Cognitive Psychology, Critical Policy Studies, Sociology, Queer Studies, and Education, and I am strongly committed to academic work that engages the participation of wider publics and which influences and dialogues with policy makers. What draws my work together across different research projects is a focus on the ways in which subjectivity and values inform changing understandings of health, wellbeing, political process, and community organisation.

 

I was awarded my PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge in 2006. Since then, I have published two ethnographic monographs, Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (Cambridge University Press 2010) and Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty First Century (Princeton University Press 2023), two journal special issue and four edited volumes.

 

I have been an Academic Associate at The College of Religious Studies, Mahidol University, Thailand, held a Visiting Senior Fellowship at The National University of Singapore, and have been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. I was awarded a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship, 2016-17.

 

Before joining UCL in 2012, I was College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. I then became The George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before taking up a Lectureship in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London. I have convened undergraduate and postgraduate medical anthropology courses at two universities, and held the posts of Head of Medical Anthropology, Head of Teaching and Deputy Head of Department at UCL.

 

At UCL, my teaching contribution in the Department and Faculty is broad, and I teach students and trains young researchers at every level.  Since my appointment in 2012, I have collaborated with my colleagues to redevelop and extend UCL’s Medical Anthropology programme; I developed undergraduate and postgraduate optional courses on the ‘Anthropology of Ethics and Morality’; I teach on the core 2nd year course ‘Being Human’; I have co-taught the interdisciplinary course, ‘Reproduction, Sex and Sexuality’; each year I contribute to the MA in Gender, Society and Representation; I am the convenor of the MSc in Medical Anthropology; and I am a primary dissertation supervisor for BSc, IBSc, MSc, MRes and PhD Anthropology students.