Robert Simpkins is a social anthropologist interested in our engagement with the world through art. A passion for music and sound drives his research, which has so far focused upon street performance and relations of sound in public space. His ethnographic research to date has been conducted in Tokyo and deals with issues of sound and selfhood, relationality in public space, gendered space, the body, affect, and well-being. He is the producer of Artery, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)-supported podcast on art, authorship, and anthropology, with Dr. Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge). He is currently working on new writing, a short film about unhoused music, as well as a Dutch government-funded project on sonic environmentalism and Japanese intangible heritage.
