A note on names

Please observe the spelling of my name. That's right, I am NOT Kristen Bell (my namesis*). Therefore, if you somehow stumbled across this website after doing a Google search on “Veronica Mars breasts” then you are going to be sorely disappointed.

It's the personal cross to bear of anyone named Kirsten that their name is consistently misread as one they have come to loathe above all others.

About

I received my PhD in social anthropology in 2000 at James Cook University in Australia and have held previous academic appointments in anthropology departments at the University of Northern Colorado, Macquarie University in Australia and the University of British Columbia. After taking a year off to complete an intensive Master of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, I joined the Centre for Research in Evolutionary, Social and Interdisciplinary Anthropology (CRESIDA) in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Roehampton in London in September 2017.

My scholarship over the past fifteen years has focused broadly on the anthropology of health and medicine—a far cry from Korean new religion, where I originally started out. I have also developed a strong interest in processes affecting academic knowledge production, especially institutional ethics review and the commercialization of scholarly publishing. It was the latter that drove my decision to embark on the Master of Publishing, which in turn led to my involvement in Libraria—a collective of anthropology and archaeology journals that are exploring alternative models of scholarly publishing. However, I have also published various pieces for a wider audience, whether it be: advice for budding academics on getting journal articles published, based on my experiences as a journal editor; ruminations on topics I find interesting but don't actually know all that much about (a grand internet tradition); and academic satire.

I developed this website after leaving Academia.edu (you can read the reasons for my departure here), because I wanted a space where people could freely access my work, but one in which I had control over its form and content—i.e., where I'm not subject to the whim of commercial imperatives (or, for that matter, institutional ones).