I received my PhD in social anthropology in 2000 from James Cook University in North Queensland, Australia. I have held academic appointments in anthropology programmes at the University of Northern Colorado, Macquarie University in Australia, the University of British Columbia in Canada, and the University of Roehampton in the UK, where I was Professor of Social Anthropology until August 2022. I am currently Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Imperial College.  

​

My academic scholarship has focused broadly on the anthropology of health and medicine—a far cry from Korean new religion, where I originally started out. I also have a strong interest in processes affecting academic knowledge production, especially institutional ethics review and the commercialisation of scholarly publishing.

 

I have also published various pieces for a wider audience, including ruminations on topics I find interesting but don't actually know all that much about (a grand internet tradition) and academic satire. Silent but Deadly is my first book-length venture into popular anthropology, where I pander to my longstanding obsession with bodily effluvia and other topics considered too trivial for academic attention. I now have a Substack blog where I post condensed excerpts from the book, new articles on similar topics and other miscellany. You can also keep abreast of posts via my Facebook author page.