David Gellner FBA

David Gellner is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls. He was Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) from 2009 to 2012 and again from 2016 to 2018. He was Director of the Institute of Human Sciences within SAME from 2020 to 2023. His teaching and research interests include the anthropology of South Asia (especially Nepal and the Himalayas, also eastern Uttar Pradesh), religion, politics, ethnicity, caste and class, borderlands, diaspora, and activism.

Gellner has been the recipient of a number of awards from the ESRC, AHRC, and BA and has published extensively. Among his recent edited books are ‘Religion, Secularism, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal’ (OUP, 2016), ‘Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora’ (OUP, 2018), ‘Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination’ (ASA conference volume, Routledge, 2022), and ‘Nepal’s Dalits in Transition’ (Vajra, 2024).