The School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography is delighted, and hugely grateful, to announce the endowment of a new position, the Wendy James Associate Professorship in Evolutionary Anthropology, with a tutorial fellowship in Human Sciences at St Hugh’s College. This position was created by the School in 2022 in order to support teaching in Human Sciences and Evolutionary Anthropology. The first holder is Dr Thomas Püschel who joined the department in September 2023. The full endowment of this position is a major statement of faith in the future of SAME’s unique interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in Human Sciences, as well as in the place of evolutionary anthropology in the School as a whole.
The position is endowed in the name of Professor Wendy James FBA, a major figure in the department between 1972 and 2007. Her long and distinguished career included the award of a CBE in 2011 and Presidency of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 2001 and 2004. She was also Vice-President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (2001–2011). She is best known for her trilogy of ethnographic and historical works on the Uduk of Sudan, ‘Kwanim Pa (1979), The Listening Ebony (1988), and War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands (2007). She wrote on Mauss, Durkheim, Collingwood, and other anthropological ancestors, and also penned a notable overview of the discipline, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (2003). The latter incorporated insights from evolutionary anthropology, including the British Academy ‘Lucy to Language’ project in which she was involved. Before taking up her lectureship at Oxford she taught in the Universities of Khartoum and Bergen and subsequently was consulted by UN bodies, NGOs working with refugees, and the FCO during and after the Sudan’s civil war (1983–2005). Wendy actively supported and taught Human Sciences throughout her teaching career at Oxford.
The Institute of Human Sciences launched a fundraising appeal on the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Human Sciences degree. This generous donation, taken together with a contribution from the university, means that the appeal is already one fifth of the way towards its target. For more information, please see here.
