British Academy elections
Graduating in Agricultural
and Forestry Sciences, as James Fairhead did, is not a classic path to a
Fellowship of the British Academy. Inspired by his St John’s tutor, Collier
Dawkins, he switched direction after leaving Oxford to take a Master’s,
followed by a PhD, in Social Anthropology at SOAS. Initially he spent two years
in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo researching how farmers understood and
manipulated soil fertility and crop health, pioneering a sort of medical
anthropology of ecological phenomena. Afterwards, in long fieldwork with his
partner, Melissa Leach, he revealed ecological practices of West Africans in
the Republic of Guinea, who were enriching landscapes that the scientific
community had been interpreting as degraded and degrading. James consequently
launched a critique of colonial and postcolonial ecology and its scientific
practices in books such as Misreading the
African Landscape and Reframing
Deforestation. He then developed a critical medical anthropology of global
medical research that focused at times on Vaccine
Anxieties – the title of a later book.
Recently, he brought his ecological and medical interests to bear when advising the humanitarian response to the Ebola outbreak through an Ebola Response Anthropology Platform that has since won a variety of awards.
James has been Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth and of assorted research initiatives, has taught at SOAS and Oxford, and since 2001 has been a Professor at the University of Sussex.
After graduation, Timon
Screech took a PhD in the History of Art at Harvard, submitting his dissertation
on the subject of new scientific instruments in 18th-century Japan and their
effects on art. This was published as The Lens within the Heart and is
still in print. Timon has since written a dozen other books, in English and
Japanese, on the visual culture of early-modern Japanese. He has just completed
a book on the first sailings of the English East India Company and is now at
work on the Oxford History of Japanese Art.
Timon has taught at many universities around the world, but his first academic post was at SOAS, where he has remained ever since.