Dr Luke Heslop
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Global Challenges

Membership and affiliation

South Asia Studies Research Group:

I am a founding member of the Brunel South Asia Studies Research Group, which aims to put regionally relevant research by Brunel anthropologists, development studies scholars, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others firmly on the map, through public roundtable events, seminars, writing workshops and other events.

Media interests

 Sri Lanka and the family firm. A photo exhibition which explores four family businesses in suburb of Colombo known as ‘Slave Island’. (December 2019, – July 2020), Old Anthropology Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.

 ‘A passage Through Passages: On Roads in South Asia’. A multimedia presentation of findings from Roads and the Politics of Thought, a European Research Council (No. 616393) funded, 5-year ethnographic study of roadbuilding in South Asia led by Edward Simpson (SOAS). For this I have provided footage and commentary for the Maldives and Sri Lanka (Jan 17th – 21st March), Brunei Gallery, SOAS.

 ‘South Asia Summit 2018’ This was a public summit organised by the LSE South Asia Centre which focussed on debating topics of Pan South Asian Significance.

 Invited Speaker

  2021         Invited speaker for Objects Across Boarder, a multidisciplinary set of panels organised by UCL and the University of Pennsylvania State.

  2020         Discussant for the MaxCam economy and kinship workshop, Cambridge University.

  2020         ‘Anthropology, Development, and Decolonisation: reflections on principles, practice, and student organising’. University of East Anglia. 22nd January.

  2019         The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA), joint-Keynote Plenary. Theme: Development, anthropology and Decolonisation (University of East Anglia).

  2019         Anthropology in London Day, plenary discussant. Theme: Turbulence. 

  2019         Cambridge Senior Seminar. ‘From haunted houses to housed hauntings: ghosts, oracles, and kinship ambivalence in a Sri Lankan merchant family’.

  2018         ‘Keeping pace with the nation: a view from small-town Sri Lanka’ For: Urban South Asia Writ Small, at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. April 20-21.

 2018         ‘Island Infrastructure: Global flows of post-colonial expertise in the Maldives’. By invitation from Lincoln College, Oxford University, 12th of January 2018, for a workshop on “The Social  Life of Work: Towards a critical understanding of the changing dynamics of work in the global South”.

 2017         ‘2nd International Workshop on Roadology’. Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. 9-11th October 2017.

 2016         'Projects of urbanity and life under construction in ‘Greater Malé’. By invitation from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. 6th October 2016.

 2015         'Of houses and households among merchant families in Dambulla'. For: Rethinking Kinship and Marriage in Sri Lanka: Gender, Intimacy, and Change. By invitation from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, AISLS. Kandy, Sri Lanka. 4th September 2015.

 2015         'Signboards and the naming of small businesses: promotion, personhood and dissimulation in a Sri Lankan market town'. By invitation from the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. 26th March 2015.

 2015         'Catching the pulse: the circulation of money in a Sri Lankan market'. By invitation from the Social Anthropology department, University of Edinburgh. 13th March 2015.

 2015         '(Re)Rethinking Anagarika Dharmapala'. For: Multiple Modernities and Multiple Colonialisms. By invitation from the Museum of Ethnology, Ryukoko University, Kyoto, Japan. 14th December 2015.