Dr Paul Anderson
- Associate Professor Middle Eastern Studies
- Assistant Director of Centre of Islamic Studies
Contact
Connect
Location
- Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies , Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB5 8EH
About
Paul Anderson is a social anthropologist of the Middle East and its global diasporas, with a particular focus on Syria, commerce, and transregional connectivity.
He received his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies (First Class) from the University of Oxford, before completing an MSc and PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, where his thesis was awarded without corrections. He joined Cambridge in 2011 and has been an Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies since 2018. He is also Assistant Director of the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies and a Fellow of Darwin College.
Research
His first book, Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, Language, and Patriarchy in Pre-Conflict Aleppo (Cornell University Press, 2023), draws on extensive fieldwork in Syria to explore the moral and political dimensions of merchant life in Aleppo's bazaar. His second monograph, Afterlives of Urban Cosmopolitanism: Muslim Asia and its Non-Muslim Diasporas (forthcoming, UCL Press), co-authored with Magnus Marsden and Vera Skvirskaja, offers an ethnographic study of inter-religious relations rooted in the historic cities of Aleppo, Kabul, Herat, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent. He is currently working on a third monograph: Beneath the Silk Road: The Social Infrastructures of China–Middle East Trade, which examines the skills, institutions, and subjectivities underpinning transregional trade networks between China and the Middle East. He is also part of an international research project on the mobilities, livelihoods, and cultural identities of Syrian Ukrainians, funded by the Danish Independent Research Fund.
Teaching and supervision
Dr Anderson teaches across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate papers in Middle Eastern Studies, including courses on the anthropology of Islam and on economy and culture in the Middle East and beyond.
Dr Anderson welcomes enquiries from prospective MPhil and PhD students who have a training in social anthropology and wish to work on projects contributing to current debates in anthropology, particularly on themes related to the following research interests:
- Economic liberalisation in authoritarian contexts
- Syrian Jews and Armenians, minoritisation and citizenship in Syria
- Trade networks connecting China and the Middle East
- Skills and subjectivities underpinning projects of transregional connectivity
- Temporalities of urgency and crisis