Emeritus Professor Richard Jenkins

Born in 1952 in Liverpool, Richard Jenkins was brought up in Northern Ireland. He moved to the Chair in Sociology at the University of Sheffield in 1995, coming from south Wales, where he had lived and worked for twelve years. Trained as a social anthropologist at the Queen's University of Belfast and the University of Cambridge, he worked for three years at the SSRC Research Unit on Ethnic Relations, at the University of Aston in Birmingham, before moving to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University College of Swansea in 1983. Elected in 2004 as an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, he retired in September 2014.

During his career he has done field research in Belfast, the West Midlands, south Wales, Denmark, and south-west England, investigating the transition to adulthood, ethnicity and racism, nationalism, informal economic activity, the social lives of people with learning difficulties, and modern supernatural and witchcraft beliefs.