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Professor John Robb FBA

Archaeological and social theory, theories of material culture, European prehistory, prehistoric and historic gender, human skeletal studies, long-term change, non-textual biography
Headshot of Professor John Robb FBA
Fellow type
UK Fellow
Year elected
2025
Sections
Archaeology
Website
https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/directory/jer39

Summary

John Robb is Professor in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. He was educated at the University of Chicago (BA, medieval English, 1983) and Michigan (MA, Anthropology, 1989; PhD, Anthropology, 1995).

After teaching at the University of Southampton (1996-2001), he moved to Cambridge in 2001. He is also a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

His research interests are broad and interdisciplinary, reflecting an apparently incurable tendency to be a generalist. He has published on social theories of material culture, human agency, long-term change, gender and politics, but he also does hands-on research in later Mediterranean prehistory (especially the Neolithic and Bronze Age), European prehistoric art, and human skeletal studies.

He has run major grant-funded interdisciplinary projects on the history of the human body, death rituals and politics in Italian prehistory, and biography and social change in skeletons from medieval Cambridge. His research in all of these fields, as well as various distracting minor projects, is ongoing.

Current post

University of Cambridge Professor of European Prehistory

Peterhouse, Cambridge Fellow

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