St Cross College, Oxford

BLitt MA DPhil FBA; Professor of Social Anthropology

E-mail: wendy.james

Phone: (01865) 559041

Wendy James, a Fellow of the British Academy, is Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford, and has previously taught in the Universities of Khartoum, Aarhus, and Bergen. She is based at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, where she has concentrated for many years on teaching postgraduates and supervising doctoral projects, but has also taught in the undergraduate degrees of Human Sciences and Archaeology & Anthropology since these courses were founded.

Wendy has carried out research in Africa, mainly in the Sudan and Ethiopia. Her interests are in long-term patterns of cultural history and the relations between minorities and majorities in post-colonial states. Recent publications include:

The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism and Anthropology, by R.G. Collingwood, original manuscripts co-edited with D. Boucher, P. Smallwood (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005).

The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches, co-edited with D. Mills (Berg, 2005).

The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (OUP, 2003).

Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and After (co-edited with D. Donham, E. Kurimoto, A. Triulzi (James Currey, 2002).

Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, co-edited with P. Dresch, D. Parkin (Berghahn, 2000).

At present, Wendy is on research leave and completing a new book for the OUP, provisionally entitled "War and Survival in Sudan's Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile". Her husband, Douglas H. Johnson, is a historian and publisher who also specializes in Africa. Now that their children are grown up, Wendy has a little more time for her hobbies, gardening and travel.