Evening Class - Lecturers and Researchers 

Chris Knight
Chris Knight is Professor of Anthropology at the University of East London. He gained his Ph.D. from the University of London with a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss' four-volume Mythologiques. His first book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture (1991), outlined a new theory of human evolution. Since then, his main research interest has been in the evolutionary emergence of language. 

In 1995, he convened a workshop in East London bringing together a small number of scholars interested in this topic. This quickly led to the first International Conference on the Evolution of Language held in Edinburgh University in 1996. Later conferences were held in East London (1998), Paris (2000), Boston (2002), Leipzig (2004), and Rome (2006). Several of the conferences have led to a significant collaborative publication. 

In 2002, Chris was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship in order to write his new book, The Human Conspiracy: Speech, Deception and the Selfish Gene, due for publication in 2007.
Ifi Amadiume
Ifi Amadiume is Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. She did her fieldwork among the Igbo in Nigeria in Africa with a special interest in gender analysis and gained her Ph.D. at the University of London (School of Oriental & African Studies) in 1984. Her research interests include African goddesses and matriarchy; spirit possession; women's organizations; social movements; human rights and social justice; gender ideology/philosophy in indigenous religions of Africa and the African diaspora; and women in African Islam. Her publications include Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1987, 6th impression 1997); African Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case (London: Karnak House, 1987); Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture (London and New Jersey: Zed Books and St. Martin's Press, 1997); Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialsim (Zed Books 2000) and The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice, co-edited with Abdullahi An Na'im (Zed Books 2000). She is also a creative writer. Her published poetry includes "Passion Waves" (London: Karnak House, 1985), "Ecstasy" (Longman Nigeria, 1995) and "Circles of Love" (NJ, USA: Frica World Press).
Denise Arnold
Denise Arnold is Director of the Institute of Aymara Language and Culture in La Paz, Bolivia. She is also Honorary Research Professor at Birkbeck College London, and Visiting Professor at the Universidad de Tarapaca Arica (doctoral programme in Anthropology and Archaeology). She is author of The Metamorphosis of Heads and several dozen monographs and articles in English and Spanish on Andean studies. Arnold is a specialist in Andean kinship and gender relations, oral literatures, textiles and visual languages, and in social movements of the contemporary Andes.
Gianantonio Candiani
Gianantonio Candiani graduated in Anthropology from the University of East London in 2006. His fieldwork-based dissertation explored the meaning of tradition for an Italian community in London. He is currently based in the Università di Padova, writing a thesis on the origins of Christianity. Gianantonio (Bubu as he is known to his friends) now lives in Treviso, Italy. bubucandiani @ gmail.com

Margaret Clegg
 Margaret Clegg has a degree in Behavioural Science, a Masters and PhD in Biological Anthropology. Her own research includes work on the evolution of human growth particularly at adolescence and the evolution of speech through investigation of anatomical markers such as the hyoid bone. 
Margaret has taught and researched Biological Anthropology at UCL, UCN and the University of Southampton. She presents regularly at conferences and seminars and has a growing list of publications.
She was recently appointed Repatriation Co-ordinator at the Natural History Museum. Her work includes investigating the provenance of the human remains being claimed for repatriation including researching the background to acquisition and the ethnography of the claimant group, together with an analysis of the scientific research and continuing value of these human remains not only to the scientific community but also to claimant group and the wider population.
Martin Edwardes
Martin's official area of knowledge is theoretical linguistics, but he has extensive interest in the origins of language. He obtained his MA by Independent Study on Language and Grammar in 2001, and his PhD on the origins of grammar in 2007 - both from the University of East London.
Martin has a varied list of publications to his name, which includes board games and a computer game, as well as some more academic presentations.
Andrew Fowler
Andrew Fowler is a field primatologist. He has studied chimpanzees in the Gashaka-Gumti National Park, Nigeria, under the supervision of Professor Volker Sommer (University College London). His research interests include the origins of language, chimpanzee nesting behaviour and the politics of primate conservation.
He was awarded his Ph.D. in 2006, and is currently studying bonobos in Zaire. This makes him one of a very small number of primate researchers to have been involved in studies of both chimpanzees and bonobos in the wild.
Kathy Garlow & Mary Sandy
Kathy Garlow (left) and Mary Sandy are representatives from the Six Nations on the Grand River community in Ontario, Canada. Their primary concern is to help defend their community against colonisation and develop international links in the struggle for indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee have been living as a Confederacy of nations organised by direct consensual democracy since 1142.
Algis Kuliukas
 Algis Kuliukas is currently a PhD student at University of Western Australia in Perth, studying the evolution of human bipedality. Specifically he is investigating the role that water might have played in the early adoption of facultative bipedalism in hominids in the late Miocene. This apparently rather modest idea is, in fact, loaded with controversy because it supports the so-called aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) - a model of human evolution which suggests that water acted as an agent of selection in our evolution more than it did in the evolution of our ape cousins. Algis has published 'Wading for Food: The Driving Force of the Evolution of Bipedalism?', in Nutrition & Health 16 267-289 (2002), and has put together an enthusiastic web site, River Apes, promoting a version of the aquatic ape hypothesis which is consistent with the most widely accepted hominid fossil record and Out of Africa timescales. He has named his model the Aquatic Hybrid Ape Hypothesis (AHAH)
  Wendy James
Wendy James is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford and past President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She has carried out research in several countries of N.E. Africa, especially the Sudan (where she also taught in the University of Khartoum) and Ethiopia. Trained in Oxford, she has pursued long-standing interests in social anthropology, its history, and its connections with neighbouring fields. Her main theoretical concerns have been with the relationship between politics and the enduring aspects of religious, cultural, and moral systems. In recent years, because of the pressing problems of conflict in Africa, she has accepted a series of consultancies with the UN and NGOs, and started to publish on themes of war and suffering.
Jerome Lewis
Jerome Lewis is a specialist on Central Africa and hunter-gatherer societies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) with Yaka forest hunter-gatherers and to a lesser extent with neighbouring farming peoples. His research is a continuing long-term ethnographic study focused on Yaka social organisation, religion and ritual structures, child development and learning, Yaka relations with other hunter-gatherers, hunter-gatherers' relations with settled people and officials, and the impact of logging and conservation initiatives. Dr Lewis has also worked with Twa Pygmies in the Great Lakes Region, but especially in Rwanda before and after the 1994 genocide and war.
Ana Lopes
Ana Lopes gained both her honours degree and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of East London.
As part of an action research project, she co-founded the International Union of Sex Workers, becoming a pivotal and driving force in the official unionization of sex workers in the UK. She is regularly requested to speak at congresses, conferences and international meetings and is often interviewed by the media as a specialist on sex work and sex workers' rights.
Her book "Sex Workers of the World, Unite!" has recently been published in Portuguese. Currently she is carrying out post-doctoral research at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
Audax Mabulla
Dr Audax Mabulla is Field Coordinator of the Archaeology Unit, University of Dar es Salaam and one of Tanzania's leading archaeologists. His major research interest is in the area of the Lake Eyasi Basin, where the present-day Hadza hunter-gatherers live. In addition to his scholarly research, he is an active champion of the land rights of the Hadza.
Phil Marfleet 
Phil Marfleet lectures in Third World Studies and is co-ordinator of UEL's MA in Refugee Studies. His research interests include globalisation and the political economy of international migration, trade, aid and unequal exchange, issues in development education, eurocentrism and 'third worldism'.
Brian Morris
Brian Morris is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Recent books by him include Kropotkin: Politics Of Community (2004, Humanity Press), Insects And Human Life (2004, Berg) and Religion And Anthropology (2006, CUP).
Dario Novellino
Dr. Dario Novellino received his Master in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies and his doctorate in environmental anthropology from the University of Kent where he is presently affiliated as a research fellow. Recently, he has completed a Wenner-Gren funded research on "Local Knowledge Hybridization in the Context of Conservation Development Projects". Between 2004-2005, Dr. Novellino also worked on an Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) project on anthropological methodologies and transmission of environmental knowledge, with strong emphasis on audio-visual documentation and participatory video.  His personal commitment and research interests include indigenous people's rights and advocacy, ethnobiological knowledge, natural resources management, perceptions of the environment and belief systems of small-scale societies. Since 1986, South East Asia has become the focus of his activities, and most of his anthropological research and publications have been focussing on the Batak and Pälawan of the Philippines. He is actively engaged in supporting these indigenous communities in their efforts to protect their environment and fulfil their rights.
Estelle Orrelle
Estelle Orrelle has a background in history and Near Eastern Archaeology and has taken part in many prehistoric excavations in Israel. Her Ph.D. dissertation (now being completed at the University of East London) focuses on the iconography of the earliest figurines to appear after the end of the Ice Ages in the Neolithic of the Near East.
Camilla Power
Camilla Power is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. Camilla has published many articles on the evolutionary origins of ritual, gender and the use of cosmetics in African initiation.
Kate Prendergast
Kate Prendergast gained her Ph.D in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. She has published in British Archaeological Reports, Archaeopress, 3rd Stone and Science & Spirit magazine. Her research interests include explorations of prehistoric and indigenous cosmologies and the role of ritual in social continuity and change. She currently works as a Researcher in African politics.
Lionel Sims
Lionel Sims is Principal Lecturer in Anthropology and Anthropology Subject Area Leader at the University of East London. Graduated in anthropology and sociology at Salford in 1967, then gaining Masters degrees in Political Sociology at LSE in 1968, Research Methods at Surrey in 1984, and in 1993 he gained his Masters Degree in Anthropology (with distinction) from University College London with a dissertation on Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Over the past decade, his research focus has been on megalithic monuments including Stonehenge, culminating in a major TV documentary – "Stonehenge Rediscovered" – screened in the summer of 2003.
  Volker Sommer
Volker Sommer is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He has published more than 100 articles - scientific as well as popular - and more than a dozen books, including novels and poetry. He is one of the best known science journalists in German-speaking countries, regularly featured on radio, television and through numerous public talks. His award-winning writings have been translated into English, Walloon, Italian, Spanish, Hindi, Korean and Japanese. His research interests include the evolution of cognition, rituals and social and sexual behaviour in primates including humans. Volker has been involved in on-going long-term field studies of the eco-ethology of langur monkeys in Rajasthan (India), of white-handed gibbons in the Khao-Yai rainforest (Thailand) and since 1999 has been the principal investigator of the Gashaka Primate Project (Nigeria), studying monkeys and chimpanzees.
Luc Steels
Luc Steels is a professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB), director of the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His scientific research interests cover the entire AI field, including natural language, vision, robot behaviour, learning, cognitive architecture and knowledge representation. His current research focuses on dialogues for humanoid robots and fundamental research into the origins of language and embodied meaning.
Creating a Robot Culture: an interview with Luc Steels
  Merl Storr
Merl Storr is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London.  She gained a doctorate in Women's Studies from the University of York and has a background in both philosophy and the social sciences.  Her book Latex and Lingerie:  Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers Parties (Berg Press 2003) is based on ethnographic fieldwork in London and Essex and proposes a new understanding of 'female bonding'.  Her current work is on the methodological and philosophical problems involved in urban fieldwork, drawing on situationism and surrealism to develop new approaches to the study of everyday urban life.
Chris Stringer
Chris Stringer is Merit Researcher in Human Origins at the London Natural History Museum. His early research concentrated on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but his current research interests extend as far back as Homo habilis and as far geographically as China and Australia. He has been closely involved in the development of the Out of Africa theory of modern human origins and now collaborates with a number of archaeologists, dating specialists and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the evolution of modern humans. He has have also directed or co-directed excavations at Pleistocene sites in England, Wales and Gibraltar, and is currently directing the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB), funded by the the Leverhulme Trust. AHOB is a 5-year project to reconstruct the pattern of the earliest human colonisation of England and Wales.
  Paul Valentine
Paul Valentine is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. Since 1980, he has been conducting fieldwork among the Curripaco, an Arawak-speaking group who live in the tropical rainforest of the northwest Amazon, on the border between Columbia and Venezuela. With his colleague Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University, Paul recently edited a book entitled Cultures of Multiple fathers: The theory and practice of partible paternity in Lowland South America (University Press of Florida, 2002).
Ian Watts
Ian Watts gained his PhD in 1998 from the University of London with a thesis on the southern African Middle Stone Age ochre record and modern human origins. In addition to his archaeological work on ochre and pigment use, Ian has published widely on African hunter-gatherer cosmology and gender ritual. He is currently completing his analysis of the ochre record at Blombos Cave, South Africa.
Charles Whitehead

Charles Whitehead was creative director of an advertising agency for twenty years before gaining his PhD in social anthropology at University College London. He teaches anthropology to cognitive science students at the University of Westminster, and is currently involved in brain imaging research on pretend play at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience. His research interests include self-consciousness, social display, and the evolution of the human brain. A central aim is to bridge the extraordinary conceptual gulfs dividing the various disciplines that attempt to understand human thought, behaviour, and consciousness.
  Jason Wilcox
Jason Wilcox is an English Literature graduate who went on to do an M.A. by Independent Study in Anthropology and Film at the University of East London after attending Chris Knight's "Human Revolution" evening class, where his special project was published as a pamphlet under the title "Civilization, Repression and the Modern Horror Film". Subsequently the first part of the M.A. was published in the Canadian film journal CINEACTION under the title "Cat People and its Two Worlds" (an analysis of the several versions of a Hollywood horror film which bears a distinct relationship to Knight's theory of cultural origins); there have also been other articles in CINEACTION and in the London-based SPIRIT magazine. Jason is also a practising film-maker whenever time and funds allow, and has written and directed five short films, the most recent of which was awarded the Runner-Up prize at the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester; he is currently about to film his first horror feature, THE BOX, on digital video.
James Woodburn
James Woodburn has retired from teaching anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. One of the foremost international specialists in hunter-gatherer ethnography, he has spent his life studying and championing the cultural identity and land rights of the Hadza bow-and-arrow hunters of Tanzania. He lives with his family in Cambridge, where he is an active campaigner for cyclists' rights.