Dr Katherine Swancutt

PhD: Magic Works: Divination, Causation and Witchcraft in North-east Mongolia and China (2003)

Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology, Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit (REDCARU), and Project Lead of the ERC-funded synergy grant project 'Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia' (2020-2026) at King's College London. For over two decades she has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Southwest China, with key research interests spanning the anthropology of religion, the social sciences in China, shamanism and animism, dreams, and the relationship between cosmology and the environment. She is the author of Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn 2012), co-editor of Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Social Analysis 2016, vol. 60, issue 1 and Berghahn 2018), and editor of Crafting Chinese Memories: The Art and Materiality of Storytelling (Berghahn 2021).