Dr Denis Regnier has a background in philosophy, a subject he has taught for several years in French secondary schools before returning to university to undertake anthropological research. He came to the LSE with the aim of conducting fieldwork in Madagascar, hence drawing and building on the Department of Anthropology’s research tradition on the island. He received his PhD from the LSE in 2012, with a dissertation on the condition of slave descendants in the southern Betsileo highlands. He has subsequently worked with Maurice Bloch as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow on an interdisciplinary project at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, for which he carried out further fieldwork in Madagascar. He has taught graduate courses in anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he is affiliated with the Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains (LAMC), and at the University of Antananarivo.

Dr Regnier is currently writing a book based on his research in Madagascar and developing a new project on the ethnohistory of a Dayak group in the context of commercial pressures on land and forest destruction in South Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo).