Rate My Professor Hannah Bulloch

Dr Hannah Bulloch is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Otago. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Australian National University, awarded the 2010 Australian Anthropological Society Best Thesis Prize, an MA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Development Studies from Massey University. Her research specializations include discourses, practices, and theories of international and community development; post-development and alternatives to development; family livelihood strategies in the Majority World, encompassing migration, remittances, and gender roles; transitions to adulthood; wellbeing and notions of the 'good life'; community-driven healthcare; personhood over the life course; and narrative nonfiction and ethnographic writing, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia (especially the Philippines), Australia, and New Zealand. She teaches courses such as ANTH 103: Introduction to Anthropology, ANTH 210: Translating Culture, ANTH 211: Contemporary Ethnographic Research, ANTH 431: People, Culture and Development, and ANTH 490: Dissertation.

Bulloch's career includes a three-year fellowship at the Australian National University's School of Archaeology and Anthropology researching Filipino women's family improvement strategies amid mobility and economic change, and a Research Fellowship at ANU's National Centre for Indigenous Studies on community-based Aboriginal healthcare. She has worked at the Institute of Development Studies (Sussex, UK) on health and governance, coordinated social sciences and humanities funding at the Royal Society Te Apārangi for the Marsden Fund, and served as a visiting researcher at Ateneo de Manila University, the University of Hawai'i, and the International Institute of Asian Studies in the Netherlands. She held office as a Director of the Australian Anthropological Society. Key publications include her first book, In Pursuit of Progress: Narratives of Development on a Philippine Island (University of Hawaii Press, 2017); Overland to the Island: New Zealand to Skye with Six Kids in a Homemade House-Truck (Otago University Press, 2025); guest-edited special issue of Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2021); and articles such as 'Magic, luck, and permeable personhood in the Philippines' (Asian Anthropology, 2023) and 'Settling in New Zealand’s small towns: Experiences of minority ethnic immigrants' (Journal of International Migration & Integration, 2023). Awards include the 2013 Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Her work addresses bicultural education and healthcare, livelihoods, migration, foetal personhood, vernacular religion, postcolonial identity, Indigenous freshwater rights, and bilateral poverty policy.