Skip to main content

Anthropology and Ethnomusicology Cluster

Anthropology and Ethnomusicology form a single research cluster with integral links to the Institute of Irish Studies and the Institute of Cognition and Culture. Key strengths of the cluster are the Anthropology of Ireland; Borders and Migration; Emotions; Performance; and Cognition and Culture.


Professor Hastings Donnan

Hastings Donnan has carried out field research in the Pakistan Himalayas where a series of projects focused on migration, on marriage, and on pilgrimage to the shrines of local Sufi saints and to Mecca.  He has also conducted research in Ireland on issues of identity and conflict along the border, and on the involvement of migrant professionals in local sport.  He is currently working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project on drivers, pedestrians and risk in Belfast.

Professor Lisette Josephides 

I conducted lengthy fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, where I lived for seven years and also taught at the university in Port Moresby. My first book, The production of inequality, investigated political and economic processes in egalitarian Melanesian societies, arguing that gender relations modelled and disguised relations of inequality. My research interests have now extended to philosophical approaches in anthropology (especially phenomenology, theories of the self, morality, ethics and emotions). My latest book Melanesian Odysseys is a culmination of my  Papua New Guinea Fieldwork and combines interests in narrative genres and theories of the self, communicative practices within a contested and changing moral and political universe, and local and anthropological knowledge.

Dr. John Knight

John Knight has undertaken extensive field research in rural Japan on a range of topics, including migration, forestry, farming, and tourism, on which he has published widely. His main area of research is human-animal relations, including sportive hunting, wildlife pests, and the use of animals in tourism. His most recent field research has been on Japanese monkey parks as sites of primatology and tourism.

Professor Fiona Magowan, Director of Research 

Fiona Magowan's research interests span issues of movement, music and the senses in anthropology and ethnomusicology. She has conducted fieldwork on religion, ritual and Christianity amongst Yolngu in north east Arnhem Land since 1990 with regular return trips over eighteen years, most recently to research cultural tourism in 2006 and mission history in 2008. Her book, Melodies of Mourning, shortlisted for the 2008 Stanner Award, examines Yolngu sensory awareness of the Northern Territory environment through music and dance, and the emotions produced by women in ritual performance. She has also carried out water development and customary marine tenure consultancies in far north Queensland and north east Arnhem Land. In recent years, she has also worked on senses of musical healing and culture in Northern Ireland and has conducted an ESRC funded project on senses of risk among drivers, pedestrians and other road users.

Dr. Graham McFarlane

Economic anthropology, perceptions of development; ethnicity, food, and consumption; British Isles and Ireland, Greece.

Dr. Jonathan Skinner

Montserrat (British Overseas Territory, Eastern Caribbean) and applied anthropology:(tourism, risk, development)
For the past ten years, I have pursued intermittent ethnographic research on the island of Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Eastern Caribbean ranging from an examination of ‘Black Irish’ ethnicity and indigenous strategies of resistance to colonialism through the performing arts (calypso, performance poetry, carnival and St Patrick’s Day festivities), the nature of risk, migration, development policy, the public understanding of science (vulcanology), and tourism regeneration.
Modern Social Dance: (salsa, jive, ballroom, same-sex; the teaching and learning of dance; fantasy and the imagination in dancing; dancing and health)
At present I hold a 3 year QUB University Research Award and a British Academy Award to conduct research comparing salsa and latino migrants and dance tourists in Sacramento and Belfast.  Also, in 2006, I was awarded a Lecturer in Industry placement to work with Artfrique dance company in Belfast which is using dance as a peace and reconciliation ‘tool’ between Protestant and Catholic youth.  For this placement, I recorded and participated in a series of dance courses and made a teaching and learning film – ‘Second Degree Dance’ – about apprenticeship and dance student development.  The success of this placement, the film and subsequent 150 page report, resulted in a Graduateship City & Guilds Senior Award in Anthropology, the first to be awarded in Anthropology.

Dr. Paulo Sousa (Acting Director, Institute of Cognition and Culture)

He has participated in many cross-cultural projects and has published numerous articles in the field of cognition and culture. He has also applied an epidemiological approach to the history of ideas of anthropology that has stimulated a major controversy. His research interests focus on folk conceptions of mind, agency and morality, religious representations and kinship relatedness. He is currently writing a book on the folk concept of moral responsibility (in the sense of culpability).

Dr. Maruska Svasek

Her principal research interests are in emotions, migration, art, material culture and border issues. In 2006 and 2007, Svašek organised three AHRC-funded international interdisciplinary conferences at Queens University Belfast on migration and emotion. Resulting from this, she has edited two special issues on these themes for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (forthcoming) and the Journal of Intercultural Studies (2008), and is working on an edited volume for Berghahn, entitled ‘Moving Subjects, Moving Objects’. In 2007, Svašek established the Cultural Dynamics and Emotions Network (CDEN) with Dr. Kala Shreen (MOP Vaishnay College for woman, Madras, India). This exciting new Network stimulates international and interdiscipline research on cultural dynamics and emotional processes, and functions as a teaching tool to facilitate local and transnational communication between lecturers and students interested in the study of emotions. To enter the CDEN website click: Cultural Dynamics and Emotions Network 

Dr. Suzel Reily

Suzel Reily has been conducting research on Brazilian musics since the early 1980s. Her main focus has been the musical traditions of southeastern popular catholicism, the topic of her book Voices of the Magi (Chicago 2002), but she has also written about various popular styles, such as bossa nova and musica sertaneja as well as issues pertaining to the development of ethnomusicological research in Brazil, a central concern of her edited volume Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities (BJE 2000). She is also interested in the ways ethnomusicologists and anthropologists might use hypermedia, and she has been involved in the construction of a website based on John Blacking's ethnographic material, titled Venda Girls' Initiation Schools, while also overseeing the student-led Music Making in Belfast Project. Her most recent hypermedia venture involved the representation of the Holy Week celebrations in Campanha, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Dr. Marina Roseman.

Recipient of the esteemed Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment of the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Foundation, and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Dr. Roseman is known for her research on music and healing, cosmology and ecology with the Temiars, Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia.  Author of Healing Sounds of the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine (U. California, 1991), she also produced the CD Dream Songs and Healing Sounds: In the Rainforests of Malaysia (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1996) and has published numerous articles in journals, including the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2007).  She is currently studying how Temiars respond and contribute to global changes and modernity in the realms of dance, movement, music, ritual, and performance, for the book Engaging the Spirits of Modernity (forth.). Most recently, she has consulted with the National Institute of Folklore, Hanoi, Vietnam, and the Vietnam Institute of Culture and Information, and presented for the Chief Minister’s Office of Sabah, Malaysia on issues surrounding tourism and the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage.


Dr. Dominic Bryan, (Director, Institute of Irish Studies)

Dr Bryan has developed a research agenda exploring rituals, symbols and memory as they influence identity and social space in Ireland. Much of his early research focused upon Orange parades in Northern Ireland (see Orange Parades: Ritual tradition and Control Pluto Press 2000) but the research now covers a much broader range of rituals and activities including St Patrick’s Day, The Lord Mayor’s Show and Carnival in Belfast. In addition, Dr Bryan has a major four year project looking at the popular flying of flags in Northern Ireland. In November 2001, Dr Bryan and Dr Gill McIntosh (Queen’s University, Belfast) were awarded substantial funding under the ESRC Devolution and Constitutional Change Research Programme to explore attempts to represent or imagine the new political dispensation in Northern Ireland through rituals and symbols. In 2005 Dr Bryan, Prof Sean Connolly and Dr Gill McIntosh won a further major ESRC grant to study of the formation and public expression of identity in Belfast, combining a long term historical study with an anthropological investigation of recent developments. From 2008, a further ESRC/IRCHSS funded project in partnership with Prof. Steve Reicher (St. Andrews University) and Prof. Orla Muldoon and Dr. Clifford Stevenson (University of Limerick) will examine St Patrick’s Day and the commemoration of the Easter Rising in Belfast and Dublin. In all this research Dr Bryan examines the policy implications of the way public space is utilised and how it influences people identity. As such, the outcomes of the research have implications for conflict resolution and understanding why violent conflict has been such a part of Northern Ireland’s recent history and why violence has diminished.

Dr. Claire White (Institute of Cognition and Culture)