Dr Daniel Knight

Dr Daniel Knight

Reader

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2985
Email
dmk3@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 21
Location
United Colleges
Office hours
Monday 11.30am–1.30pm

 

Research areas

Books

2021    Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen. Oxford: Berghahn.

2019    The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (co-authored with Rebecca Bryant)

2017    Ethnographies of Austerity. London: Routledge. ([with new Afterword], co-edited with Charles Stewart)

2015    History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Edited Journal Collections

2023   Polycrisis. Anthropology Today 39(2). (with David Henig)

2022   The Vertiginous: Temporalities and Affects of Social Vertigo. Anthropological Theory Commons. (with Fran Markowitz and Martin Demant Frederiken)

2020    Emptiness. Cultural Anthropology, Theorizing the Contemporary. (with Dace Dzenovska)

2019    Orientations to the Future. American Ethnologist. (with Rebecca Bryant)

2017    Alternatives to Austerity. Anthropology Today 33(5). (with Laura Bear)

2016    Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe. History and Anthropology 27(1). (with Charles Stewart)

Biography

Dr Daniel M. Knight is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Durham University and collaborates closely with the British School at Athens. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Durham University and a BA from University of Wales, Lampeter.

Daniel has conducted ethnographic research in Thessaly, central Greece, since 2003, writing on the economic crisis, time and temporality, neoliberalism and neocolonialism, and renewable energy. His first book, “History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece” (Palgrave, 2015) explores how moments of the past are intricately woven together and embodied during eras of social upheaval. Turning his attention from the past to the future, Daniel is co-author of “The Anthropology of the Future” (Cambridge University Press, 2019), where he presents the concept of ‘orientations’ as a way to study the indefinite teleologies of everyday life. His most recent monograph, Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn, 2021) presents a theory of temporal vertigo and associated affects induced by a period of chronic crisis in Greece.

His recent Leverhulme Trust project focused on the temporal complexity of renewable energy initiatives in austerity Greece, addressing how economic uncertainty has created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism while renewables are locally perceived as neo-colonial programs and new extractive economies. This research is currently being written-up as a monograph under the provisional title “Renewable Energy in the Age of Austerity”.

Daniel is co-editor of “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe” (Routledge, 2017) and has edited special collections on “Alternatives to Austerity”, “Orientations to the Future”, "Emptiness", "The Vertiginous: Temporalities and Affects of Social Vertigo" and "Polycrisis". He is co-editor of “History and Anthropology” journal, co-convenes the ASA's "Anthropology of Time Network" and is an Associate of the Higher Education Academy. His research has been funded by the ESRC, EPSRC, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy and National Bank of Greece.

Daniel has delivered keynote addresses to the Israeli Anthropological Association, the Italian Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Danish Association of Anthropologists (MegaSeminar), to the Croatia-Slovenia Urban Futures project and keynote interdisciplinary humanities lectures in Luxembourg and Manchester.

Research Interests / Supervision Topics:

History and Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of the Future, Anthropology of Crisis, Time and Temporality, Renewable Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, Modern Greece, European (especially Balkan and Mediterranean) Anthropology, Michel Serres

PhD supervision

  • Manar Kawasmi
  • Andreas Vavvos
  • Hector Trujillo
  • Connor Eckersall
  • Evgeniya Pakhomova
  • Ashley Bowes
  • Daniel Davies

Selected publications

 

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