I am an anthropologist working broadly on political myth, with a particular interest in the mechanics of technology, social polarization, authoritarianism, and the rise of conspiracy theories in Europe. I’m particularly focused on the intersection between cultural anthropology and sociological theories about structural change, and look to use traditional ethnographic approaches to understand the turbulent transformations occurring in contemporary British society.
I obtained my PhD in Anthropology at Princeton University, where my dissertation research became my first book: What Brexit Means: An Anthropology of Polarisation and Cultural Change. The monograph explores the rise of populism in Britain 2016-2022. Drawing on several years of ethnographic fieldwork amongst ideologically committed Brexit activists, it examines the discourse of populism across language, culture, politics, psychology, and cognition, with a focus on explaining how Brexit was an expression of ritually renewing social order and solidarity. Rejecting the notion that the territory of populism studies belongs to political science, this book shows how it is in the realm of anthropology - myth, ritual, alterity, consciousness, selfhood - that we witness the most compelling examples of how a phenomenon as modern as populism depends upon the same symbolic logics that we find in the premodern world.
My second book, Written By the Victors, will be published by Penguin Allen Lane in 2027. It tells the story of how the invention of literacy radically transformed humanity, largely for the worse. It is the story of the people who, through the centuries, were brought under the yoke of state control via literacy. This book is more commercially minded and speaks more to my interest in public-facing anthropology.
I’m interested in continuing my research on the increasingly perilous state of change in Britain and the United States. Political anthropology remains one of the most effective (but sadly least well-known) theoretical approaches to understanding why such rapid cultural change is occurring at the moment.