Neil Carrier

Neil is involved in the teaching of the MSc in African Studies and also teaches and supervises graduate students in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Neil has been involved in a wide range of research, mostly focused on the anthropology and history of East Africa and its diaspora. He has been working on a project examining the Somali-dominated Nairobi estate of Eastleigh as part of the Oxford Diasporas Programme team, exploring the historical and cultural underpinnings of Eastleigh’s diaspora-driven economy. Neil also maintains his interest in the topic of Africa and its drug trade which developed out of his earlier research on the stimulant khat, and he has developed this interest in his recently published book 'African and the War on Drugs', which he wrote in collaboration with Gernot Klantschnig. Recently he has been involved in a number of projects relating to film and photography, in particular his work with Sloan Mahone and David Anderson on the AHRC-funded project 'Trauma and Personhood in Late Colonial Kenya', examining the photographic collection of the late Edward Margetts, head of Mathari Hospital, Nairobi, in the 1950s. Neil has collaborated with the Pitt Rivers Museum on digitising a collection of photographs and negatives donated by Paul Baxter who conducted pioneering fieldwork in northern Kenya in the early 1950s. In July 2010 he conducted a photographic-repatriation project alongside Dr Kimo Quaintance, returning many of the images in the Baxter Collection to northern Kenya. For much of 2009 and 2010, Neil was based in Kenya, conducting research for the project ‘Heritage, Museums and Memorialisation in Kenya’ , visiting a number of heritage sites in the country, and also working with Professor Beinart on wildlife photography, studying the East African networks involved in such productions as ‘Born Free’ and ‘King Solomon’s Mines’.