I studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics as an undergraduate, and Social Anthropology as a postgraduate, at Oxford University. After teaching for twenty years at University College London, I joined the Manchester department in September 1996, and served as its Head from 1997 to 2001. I was Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth from April 2005 to April 2009, and became a Vice-President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in July 2009, responsible for organizing the 17th IUAES World Cogress, which will be held in Manchester in August 2013.

I am a specialist on Latin America, with a particular interest in Mexico, Central America and Brazil. My thematic interests are in political, economic and historical anthropology. I am co-managing editor of the journal Critique of Anthropology and on a member of the editorial boards of Anthropological Theory, Identities, The Journal of Power, and The Journal of Latin American Studies. I maintain close contacts with a number of Latin American universities and anthropological research centres, and have also taught in several Mexican institutions.

I am currently supervising PhD students working in Brazil, Canada, El Salvador, Mexico and the UK.

In addition to teaching in social anthropology, I am also involved in the teaching of the MA programme in Latin American Cultural Studies and Co-Director of the university's inter-disciplinary Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Autumn 2008 saw the completion of an AHRC-funded research project that I directed with my Manchester colleague Dr Patience Schell under the auspices of CLACS, which brought together a group of scholars from universities in Brazil, Mexico, the UK and the USA, Rethinking Histories of Resistance in Brazil and Mexico. For further details and papers from the project follow the link on the left. These links also provide access to on-line papers and multimedia websites on some of my other past research.