Stuart Kirsch

Stuart Kirsch is the Roy A. Rappaport Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His research asks questions about politics and the environment. 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, which is supported by the NOMIS Foundation in Zürich, focuses on the postcarbon transition, including concrete as a hard-to-decarbonize sector of the economy and mangrove conservation as an example of carbon sequestration. 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, carbon accounting, environmental anthropology, indigenous political movements, and the anthropology of property. He is also the creator and a co-convenor of the ethnography lab for post-fieldwork students writing their dissertations. 

His Ph.D. students have conducted research from Australia to Yalálag, Mexico, with Zapotec speakers.

Research topic(s)

• climate change
• corporate accountability
• engaged anthropology
• the future
• indigenous rights
• industrial ethnography
• political ecology
• property

Affiliation(s)

• Anthropology & History 
• Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies
• Center for Southeast Asian Studies
• Donia Human Rights Center
• Global CO2 Initiative
• Graham Sustainability Instsitute
• Institute for Energy Solutions
• Museum Studies Program
• Program in the Environment
• Program in International and Comparative 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 
• 1988 Fulbright-Hays
• 1987 National Science Foundation
• 1983 Lady Davis Foundation