Our approach to the study of British cultures is defined by three pillars: it is deeply comparative and multidisciplinary, drawing on anthropology, law, political economy, and sociology, amongst other disciplines. It is also ethnographic and empirically grounded. And finally, it is decolonial and publicly engaged, committed to produce not only scholarly excellence but radical knowledge that helps dismantle structures of hierarchy and power.
Prof. Dr. Insa Lee Koch is Chair of British Cultures at the SHSS, University of Sankt Gallen, and Visiting Professor in Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE). Trained at the LSE and the University of Oxford as both an anthropologist and a lawyer, Insa is an interdisciplinary scholar who works on questions of empire, race, class, the law and the state. Her monograph Personalizing the State (OUP, 2018), available open access, is an award-winning ethnographic study of class, public law, and state-citizen relations in austerity-ridden Britain. He second monograph, Drugs, Race and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law (OUP, 2026), also available open access, investigates Britain’s modern slavery laws against the backdrop of legacies of transatlantic slavery and racial empire. Insa is starting a new SNF-funded research project on ‘moral economies of racial reckoning’, investigating together with Post-doc Victoria Klinkert and doctoral researchers the current (anti)racist conjuncture at a time of growing fashism as well as anti-racist resistance. More information about Insa's work and publications here.
Dr. Victoria Klinkert is an anthropologist interested in decolonial theory, critical whiteness studies and abolitionisms. She has just completed her PhD at SOAS, in which she conducted an ethnography on white ignorance within an elite university in the UK as well as within British anthropology itself. She has published on her research, as well as on decolonising ethnographies (with Prof Raminder Kaur) in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and Darkmatter in addition to addressing the topic of decolonising anthropology more broadly (with Zouhair Hammana and the River and Fire Collective) in Teaching Anthropology.
Dr. Martha McCurdy is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of British Cultures. Her PhD from the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics (LSE) examined the (in)visible discourses and fatalities related to Britain’s immigration system and everyday borders. Alongside her own ethnographic research, she has also conducted extensive research on video courts. Her research interests relate to questions of citizenship, borders, migration, and the law, as well as qualitative research methods. She is currently exploring the intersection of modern slavery and immigration.
