Willem E. Church

Willem Church is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of social and evolutionary anthropology, with a research interest in intra and inter-group cooperation and conflict, particularly when such interactions occur across nominal group boundaries or result in new groups. His current research focuses on the evolutionary dynamics of norms amongst multi-cultural populations, with a particular interest in how individuals of different cultural background and mother-tongue can come to cooperate in situations where which norms (and whose) apply in an interaction is ambiguous. From October 2021, Church will be commencing a two-year post-doctoral research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (postdoc.mobility). At Leipzig, Willem will begin building computational models of the evolutionary dynamics of norms in multi-cultural populations. Willem’s prior doctoral research was at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland) examined factional competition around a prospective copper-gold mine in Papua New Guinea.