Peter Wynn Kirby is a climate and energy specialist and ethnographer at the University of Oxford, where he is a lifetime Senior Member of Saint Antony's College, Oxford. Peter's latest research fellowship was awarded by the Leverhulme Trust (based at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford). He is also a High-End Overseas Visiting Fellow at Shanghai University. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
 
Peter has been a researcher at the University of Oxford for over a decade. He came to Oxford as Brookes' Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan. Prior to taking up that post, Peter conducted nearly three years of research in France on waste and nuclear risk while based at the Centre de Recherches sur le Japon, EHESS, Paris. He also spent several years as a tenured assistant professor at Ritsumeikan in Japan and held a research post in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Tokyo University while engaging in extensive Japan-based fieldwork. While working in Japan, he returned to the UK to lecture on the 'cultures' of global environmentalism each winter in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge.

His latest book, The Coming Surge: Coping with a Climate Reckoning Through Energy (Princeton University Press, 2026), is an attempt to think through and communicate the complexity of the slow-burn climate crisis for a more general readership. Peter brings together research in Japan and China with fieldwork and other investigation in France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere to analyze how renewables stack up against nuclear power in divergent cultural and political contexts. (Renewables and nuclear are the two top contenders in the race to phase out fossil fuels in a world of increasing electronic devices and electric vehicles, dispersed low-carbon energy generation, and data centers popping up like poisonous mushrooms in all manner of locations.) The book offers a wide-ranging perspective on contemporary geopolitics related to energy issues in a time of war in the Persian Gulf and Europe, headlong AI development, dogged efforts to expand human space exploration and extraterrestrial settlement, and dramatic political upheaval, not least in the USA. Peter was invited to deliver a TEDx talk on climate and energy issues in Dublin, Ireland, in 2026. He took this opportunity to employ perhaps unusual discursive approaches to try to make the climate crisis more comprehensible and memorable to a non-specialist live audience and to viewers globally. 
 
Peter was awarded a grant from the John Fell OUP Research Fund, along with colleague Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright, to scrutinize e-waste flows in East Asia and the peculiar industrial ecology of sorts that has developed between Japan, China and the USA. The grant, entitled 'Urban Mining, Toxic Payload: Transnational Circuits of E-Waste Between Japan and China', sent Peter to China to embark on ethnographic fieldwork there. The Leverhulme Trust grant extends and deepens this multi-pronged research project.

Peter has also done extensive research on nuclear power in Japan, France, and the UK; nuclear fallout and decontamination in Fukushima; and a cultural analysis of waste, pollution, and purity in Japan generally. While much of Peter's research has, then, been directed toward an analysis of environmental issues in East Asia - most harrowingly in ethnographic pursuit of toxic waste controversies - his interests span a range of themes including reckonings of illness and health; interpretation of 'space' and movement; architecture, discipline, and resistance in cities; operations of social exclusion; the complex 'conversions' of material culture, from recycled garbage to reprocessed radioactive matter; and popular culture, particularly involving representations of dystopia.

Since 2011, he has helped develop and teach an innovative Masters seminar, winner of Oxford University's Teaching Excellence Award, along with colleagues from Oxford's interdisciplinary 'Health, Environment, Development' (HED) collaboration.
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He was runner-up for the Area Prize for New Research in Geography.

Email: peter.kirby [AT] sant.ox.ac.uk