Ruth Toulson received her Ph.D from the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, England in July 2009. Her B.A. and M. Phil degrees are also from the University of Cambridge, where she is a member of Newnham College. She has taught at Denison University since 2007.

Dr. Toulson’s field research shifts between sites in Southeast Asia and China, and engages with the particular entanglements of politics, economics, and culture on the Asia Pacific rim.

Her doctoral work, with Hokkien speaking ethnic-Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia, considers the personal perils of capitalist modernity, interrogated through the lens of popular imaginings of the dissatisfied dead. While Singapore is often imagined as disenchanted and sterile, Dr. Toulson reveals that in fact its citizens live an extraordinarily rich and hitherto largely undocumented life of interaction with malevolent ghosts, capricious ancestors, and the undead whom they speak of as pervading their homes and public spaces. She presents accounts from coffin carriers, gravediggers, personal shoppers for the dead who describe their efforts to satisfy both the desires of the dead and the demands of the state. She focuses particularly on the women and children who tend to the dead and are caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the patriarchal family, and a moralistic developmental state. Dr. Toulson’s current research, in Sichuan Province, focuses on gendered terrain of disaster and on childhood.

Dr. Toulson teaches classes in contemporary social theory, cities and urbanism, contemporary China, childhood and death.  She would be interested in supervising senior research projects on any themes linked to her research, particularly projects that consider the hand of the state in shaping religious expression, the culture of East Asian capitalism and the region’s rapid economic development, and childhood and education in the East Asian context.