David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology University College London.  Formerly, he was Reader in Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

By training a social anthropologist, he has worked extensively in modern Turkey, where he was sometime Assistant and Acting Director of the British Institute of Archaeology. His ethnographic researches include the study of state, politics and religion in Turkey, with the special study of the Alevis, a non-normative minority (The Alevis of modern Turkey, Routledge, 2007), and investigations into the relationship between excavation, archaeology and the secular state.

He has also conducted researches over many years into the history of anthropology, particularly concentrating on the emergence of modern disciplinary boundaries (Shankland, ed. Anthropology and Archaeology, Berg 2012). He has also produced work on Westermarck (Westermarck, ed. RAI 2014), F. W. Hasluck (Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in Anatolia, 2004, 2013: Isis Press, Istanbul), and also on J. L Myres, and the emergence of modern anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he has been Humphrey Wanley Bodleian Library Fellow.

He directs the institute’s ongoing project on the history of anthropology over the last 150 years, which attempts to reassess the place of the RAI in the creation of anthropology, and to highlight the multiple, interlocking scholarly roots of the modern discipline.

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