Kirsch, Stuart

Biography

Stuart Kirsch is the Roy A. Rappaport Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His research asks questions about the environment and sustainability. He is the author of Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea (Stanford University Press 2006) and Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics (University of California Press 2014). His most recent monograph is Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text (University of California Press 2018). Professor Kirsch has worked extensively as an engaged anthropologist, including long-term research and advocacy with people living downstream from the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea and political refugees from West Papua, Indonesia. He has also consulted for the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands; on conservation in Papua New Guinea; on indigenous land rights and mining in Guyana, the Solomon Islands, and Suriname; and with an engineering firm that designs machinery for the mining industry. He is regularly asked to provide advice and serve as an expert witness in legal cases about indigneous rights and the environment. Professor Kirsch has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths (University of London), Notre Dame, Yale and most recently at L'École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His current research project, Transitions: Pathways to a Post-Carbon Future, is supported by the NOMIS Foundation in Zürich. He is a receipient of the Berlin Prize and was the fall 2023 Mercedes-Benz fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where he studied carbon accounting. At the University of Michigan he teaches courses on the Anthropocene, climate change, environmental anthropology, indigenous political movements, and the anthropology of property. He is also a co-convenor of the ethnography lab for postfieldwork students writing their dissertations. Research topic(s): hard to abate sectors of the economy (cement and concrete); carbon sequestration (mangroves); carbon accounting; global supply chains; circular economies (metal recycling)