Stuart Kirsch is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has carried out long-term fieldwork with the Yonggom or Muyu people, who are divided by the border between Papua New Guinea and West Papua, Indonesia. For many years, he collaborated with the Yonggom on their political campaign and legal struggle against the environmental impacts of the Ok Tedi mine. His research interests include corporations, indigenous movements, lost tribes, mining, political ecology, political violence, property, and ritual and myth. He is the author of Reverse anthropology: Indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea (Stanford University Press, 2006).
From 2007-2008, Kirsch was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, where he began work on a new project on corporate responses to critique. He recently received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and a Michigan Humanities Award to complete this project in 2010-2011.
Professor Kirsch has consulted widely on indigenous rights and environmental issues, including work on mining and property rights in the Solomon Islands, compensation for damages caused by nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, and conservation and development in the Lakekamu River Basin of Papua New Guinea. From 2000-2002, Kirsch was a participant in a collaborative research project on cultural property rights at the University of Cambridge. He was recently funded by ESRC-SSRC to provide a comparative perspective on a joint research project on mining conflicts in Latin America. He is the sponsor of a collaborative research project on mining and corporate social responsibility with several graduate and post-doctoral students. Kirsch also collaborates with Amerindian communities in Suriname on the impact of bauxite mining and a court case on indigenous land rights.
Professor Kirsch received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and taught at Mount Holyoke College before coming to the University of Michigan in 1995. He has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Economic and Social Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Social Science Resarch Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Goldsmiths’ College in London. At the University of Michigan he teaches undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on anthropology and history, environmental anthropology, indigenous movements, Melanesia, mining, and property.
