Chris Hann was born in Wales in 1953 and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before switching to Social Anthropology as a graduate student in Cambridge. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at Kent from 1992 to 1997. Between 1997 and 1999 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. He is now a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale.
Research Interests: Professor Hann's first major publication was based on his PhD: Tázlár: a Village in Hungary, Cambridge University Press, 1980. Later he carried out fieldwork in Poland (A Village Without Solidarity; Polish peasants in years of crisis, Yale University Press, 1985) and in Turkey (Turkish Region; state, market and social identities on the East Black Sea coast, James Currey 2000, with Ildikó Bellér-Hann). At present (2006-2009) he is engaged in a major project in eastern Xinjiang, China.