Rate My Professor Tamara Kohn

Professor Tamara Kohn is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne, a position she has held since 2006. She earned her BA (Hons) from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982, MA in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 1988. Prior to Melbourne, Kohn held research and teaching positions at universities in England, including the University of Oxford and Durham University. She has served as Discipline Chair of Anthropology and currently coordinates the Anthropology major. Kohn leads the DeathTech Research Group and supervises PhD students in her research areas. Her career includes roles such as Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council Discovery Grants for Sonic Practice in Japan (2013-2015, with Carolyn Stevens and Richard Chenhall) and Digital Commemoration (2014-2016, with Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, and Bjorn Nansen). She was an IAS Fellow at Durham University in 2018.

Kohn's research specializations in humanistic and socio-cultural anthropology center on death studies, including remembering and forgetting the dead, deathcare amid 'peak death', digital legacies, and technology's role in mourning through DeathTech. Other interests include the anthropology of the body and senses, creative practice, mobility and leisure, and ethnographic methods and ethics. Her fieldwork encompasses the Scottish Hebrides, eastern hills of Nepal, Japan, the United States, and Australia. Key publications feature the co-edited book Extending the Boundaries of Care: Medical Ethics and Caring Practices (1999, with Rosemary McKechnie), 'Mom's Pecan Rolls' in Anthropology Today (2002), contributions to Death and Digital Media (2017), 'Robot Death Care: A Study of Funerary Practice' (2021), and 'Representing Alkaline Hydrolysis: A Material-Semiotic Analysis' (2023). She has also contributed to Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured and The Future Cemetery project. With 1934 citations on Google Scholar, Kohn's interdisciplinary work impacts fields like digital anthropology, sensory ethnography, and end-of-life technologies.