Stuart Kirsch is associate professor in the department 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. His research interests include ritual and myth, indigenous movements, political ecology, mining, lost tribes, political violence, and property. He is most recently 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. Kirsch previously collaborated with a research group on cultural property rights at the University of Cambridge and recently received funding from ESRC-SSRC to collaborate with colleagues at the University of Manchester on mining conflicts in Latin America. He 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, conservation and development in the Lakekamu River Basin of Papua New Guinea, and the impacts of bauxite mining on Amerindian communities in Suriname.
Professor Kirsch received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and taught for several years at Mount Holyoke College before coming to the University of Michigan in 1995. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Social Science Research Council, and the Royal Anthropological Institute. 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.
