Nigel Rapport

Nigel Rapport

Professor, Anthropological and Philosophical Studies

University of St Andrews

Nigel Rapport (MA (Cambridge), PhD (Manchester)) is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews and Head of School of Philosophy, Social Anthropology, Film and Music. 

He is the founding director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal, and been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Nigel Rapport’s research interests include: social theory; phenomenology; individual identity, character and consciousness; literary anthropology, narrative and aesthetics; symbolic interactionism, community studies and conversation analysis; globalization and cosmopolitanism, liberalism and freedom.

Nigel Rapport is author of the following books:

  • Talking Violence. An anthropological interpretation of conversation in the city (ISER Press, Memorial University 1987);
  • Diverse World-Views in an English Village (Edinburgh University Press 1993);
  • 'The Prose and the Passion'. Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E. M. Forster (Manchester University Press 1994);
  • Transcendent Individual. Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology (Routledge 1997);
  • The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity [with Vered Amit] (Pluto 2002);
  • 'I am Dynamite': An Alternative Anthropology of Power (Routledge 2003);
  • Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work (Carolina Academic 2008);
  • Community, Cosmopolitanism, and the Problem of Human Commonality [with Vered Amit] (Pluto 2012);
  • Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (Berghahn 2012).
  • Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts [third edition] (Routledge 2014).
  • Distortion and Love: An anthropological reading of the life and art of Stanley Spencer (Ashgate 2016).