I am an evolutionary and linguistic anthropologist and have been on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology & Archaeology since 2012. Prior to that I worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. I am also Secretary of the Cultural Evolution Society.

Like most anthropologists, I want to understand cultural diversity. There are two parts to that inquiry: Why do humans–a single species–have so much variation in behaviour and culture? But: Why don’t human societies vary more? My work seeks to do cross-cultural research in new and innovative ways by combining methods, data, and theory from biology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. I have a background, either through formal training or long-term collaborative practice, in all these fields. My core subfield is cultural phylogenetics: understanding cultural diversity using the same statistical tools that biologists use to investigate evolutionary and diversity processes in other species.

My current projects focus on:

* The cultural evolution of kinship diversity, from child acquisition to social norms 

* The roles of social learning biases in the transmission of narratives 

* Natural resource use, particularly the cultural uses of plants in the Viking and Pacific worlds

* Enabling cultural macroevolution through databases (KinBank, D-PLACE, Numeralbank)

Interdisciplinarity is critical to understanding human cultural diversity, and so I like to use my ability to translate between fields to bring people and ideas together. Researchers and students in my group involve phylogenetic modelling, fieldwork and participant observation, elicitation experiments, transmission chains, interviews, corpus linguistics, and more.