Stuart Kirsch

Stuart Kirsch asks questions about globalization and development in his research, especially concerns about the environment and sustainability. His scholarly interests include climate change, the corporation, design ethnography, engaged anthropology, open futures, political ecology, property, and social movements. He is the author of Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea (Stanford University Press 2006); Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics (University of California Press 2014); and 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 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 has held visiting research appointments at the University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths (University of London), Notre Dame, and Yale, and was recently a visiting professor at EHESS Paris. 

Professor Kirsch's current research project, Transitions: Pathways to a Post-Carbon Future, is supported by the NOMIS Foundation in Switzerland. He is a receipient of the Berlin Prize and the fall 2023 Mercedes-Benz fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. At the University of Michigan he teaches courses on the Anthropocene, environmental anthropology, indigenous political movements, and the anthropology of property. He is also a co-convenor of ethnography lab for postfieldwork students writing their dissertations. 

Research topic(s)

• climate change
• corporations
• design ethnography
• engaged anthropology
• indigenous movements
• open futures
• political ecology
• property

Affiliation(s)

• Anthropology & History 
• Program in the Environment
• Human Rights Center
• Science, Technology, & Society 
• Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Award(s)

• 2023 UM Collegiate Professorship
• 2023 Berlin Prize
• 2023 EHESS Visiting Professorship 
• 2020 NOMIS Foundation
• 2018 UM Faculty Recognition Award 
• 2016 Kellogg Institute for International Studies  
• 2010 American Council of Learned Societies  
• 2009 Michigan Humanities Award
• 2008 ESRC-SSRC
• 2007 Program in Agrarian Studies 
• 2000 University of Cambridge 
• 1998 Royal Anthropological Institute 
• 1996 National Endowment for the Humanities  
• 1996 Wenner-Gren Foundation 
• 1990 Fulbright-Hays
• 1989 National Science Foundation