Mark Leopold
Before becoming an anthropologist, Mark Leopold worked as a journalist, researcher and consultant. In 1987, with Patrick Fitzgerald, he published Stranger On The Line: the Secret History of Phone Tapping (London, Bodley Head).
From 1991-1995 Mark was a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford Refugee Studies Program. After completing a Masters in Social Anthropology, and fieldwork in North Western Uganda, he gained his D.Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2001.
His 2005 book based on this research was Inside West Nile: Violence, History and Representation on an African Frontier (London, Santa Fe and Kampala, James Currey).
Before starting as a Lecturer at Sussex in 2006, he taught social anthropology at the University of Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Research
Mark Leopold's research focuses on the political and historical anthropology of Africa, particularly north east Africa (especially northern Uganda, southern Sudan and north east Democratic Republic of Congo).
Fieldwork in Arua district, north west Uganda, between 1995 and 1998, together with archival research in Uganda and the UK, has so far led to a book and a number of journal articles and book chapters. Mark's work addresses such issues as the causes and consequences of war and political violence, the relationship between past and present and that between representation and reality, concepts of masculinity, forced migration, the nature of border areas, and the role of the state and non-state organizations in contemporary Africa. Specific topics on which Mark has written include legacies of slavery in Sudan and Uganda, the role of northern NGOs in African conflict areas, and the relationship between local history writing and post-conflict reconstruction.
He is currently writing a biography of former Ugandan President Idi Amin (for Yale University Press), and is part of an EU-funded research project on conflict, water politics and climate change. He is also interested in the effects of recent oil discoveries in West and North West Uganda, and the role of the oil industry and other transnational factors in the recent war and current peacemaking process in southern Sudan, as well as in various aspects of the history of social anthropology. He has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for one year from August 1 2010, to finish his book on Idi Amin.
Source: University of Sussex
