Anthony Simpson

My first book, Half-London in Zambia, a revised version of my PhD thesis, is an ethnography of a mission school in Zambia where I taught for almost twenty years.

My second book, Boys to Men in the Shadow of AIDS, explores the production and performance of masculinities among mission-educated men in Zambia and the consequences of these for the transmission of HIV and for dealing with the AIDS epidemic.

My research interests continue to include medical anthropology, HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, masculinities, childhood and education, Christianity, missionaries and religious conversion, and death.  I am in the preliminary stages of preparing a book manuscript on ageing masculinities, religious ideas and HIV /AIDS.

Regional specialisation Central and Southern Africa.

I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in 1996 and returned to Zambia where I had been working as a volunteer teacher since the early 1970s.  I returned to the U.K. in 1997 and was a Temporary Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Manchester University from 1998 to 2001.  I returned to Zambia in 2002 on an ESRC research fellowship to pursue my research interests in masculinities and HIV/ AIDS.  I returned to Manchester as a lecturer in 2004 and became a senior lecturer in 2014.  I continue to pursue research into the social aspects of HIV and AIDS and I am currently an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies.