Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Professor Tom Selwyn

Key information

Roles
Department of Anthropology and Sociology Professorial Research Associate Centre for Ottoman Studies Member SOAS South Asia Institute Academic staff
Qualifications
PhD (SOAS)
Building
Russell Square: College Buildings
Email address
ts14@soas.ac.uk

Biography

Tom Selwyn is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS and a Visiting Professor at Breda University, The Netherlands, and Bethlehem University, Palestine. He was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Professorial Research Fellowship in 2014.

He is widely published in the field of the anthropology of tourism/pilgrimage/cultural heritage with regional interests in the Mediterranean, in particular Palestine/Israel. He directed/co-directed four major research and development projects in the Mediterranean region for the European Commission between 1990 and 2010 and founded the MA in the Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage (ATTP) at SOAS in 2010. He co-convenes the SOAS ATTP summer school, was awarded the Lucy Mair medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2009, and was Hon. Librarian of the RAI library collection at the British Museum for a decade.

He is co-editor (with Nicola Frost) of the series "Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings" for Berghahn publishers and co-editor of Travelling Towards Home (2018) in that series. His recent publications include “Tourism, Travel, and Pilgrimage” in H. Callan (ed), International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Wiley, 2018); “Brexit, Grenfell, Windrush, and the mooring, un-mooring, and re-mooring of home” in Ethnoscripts (2019); “The politics of Palestinian suffering, commemoration, and belonging” (review article) in JRAI (2020); Foreword to H. Andrews (ed), Brexit and Tourism: Travel, Borders and Identity (Channel View, 2020); and “Why People Travel” (Independent Travel Commission, 2021).

Publications

Contact Tom