DrMichael Edwards

Michael joined the University of Sydney as a Lecturer in Anthropology in 2024. An anthropologist of religious life, media ecology, and political change, he received his PhD from the London School of Economics and was a Smuts Research Fellow in South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.

His first book, Myanmar and the Dissonance of Salvation, is forthcoming in 2027 with the University of California Press as part of its Atelier series. A study of the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism amid Myanmar’s fleeting democratic opening, the book considers the politics of salvation—as a promise, a project, and a problem. Michael has started work on a second ethnographic project (supported by the Social Science Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the University of Cambridge), exploring questions of religion, diaspora, and solidarity that are emerging from Myanmar’s unfolding revolution.

He also writes and teaches on such topics as translation, grace, imagination, presence, the 1990s, and the history of anthropology (the topic of this recent conversation).

A winner of the Teaching Excellence Award at Sydney, Michael previously taught at the LSE, King’s College London, and Cambridge. He serves on the board of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, is an editor at the History of Anthropology Review, and co-leads the Ritual and Performance research cluster at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre.

Before academia, Michael worked as a researcher at the Australian Human Rights Commission, International Crisis Group, and Refugee Council of Australia. He is a founding member of the Jewish Council of Australia.