Kirsten Bell is the UK's pre-eminent Australian, British and Canadian anthropologist.* She received her PhD in social anthropology in 2000 from James Cook University in North Queensland, Australia and has held academic appointments at the University of Northern Colorado, Macquarie University, the University of British Columbia, King's College London, and the University of Roehampton, where she was Professor of Social Anthropology. She is currently Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Imperial College London.  

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Her academic scholarship focuses broadly on the anthropology of health and medicine—a far cry from Korean new religion, where she originally started out. She also has a strong interest in processes affecting academic knowledge production, especially institutional ethics review and transformations in scholarly publishing.

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She has also written extensively for the public, although you won't find much cross-over between her academic and public writing. The latter panders to her longstanding obsession with bodily effluvia and other topics considered too trivial for academic attention. She has a free Substack where she posts articles on similar topics. If you're interested in her thoughts on all manner of inane, mundane and profane topics, you can use the sign-up form to the left.