Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies

Avner Offer is Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of All Souls College and of the British Academy. He was born and educated in Israel, graduated from the Hebrew University, and took his D.Phil. at Oxford. He initially studied land tenure, international political economy and the economics of war, and published Property and Politics 1870-1914 (CUP, 1981), and The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (OUP, 1989) as well as many articles. Subsequently he has focused on consumption and the quality of life (e.g. ed. In Pursuit of the Quality of Life (OUP, 1996)), and more recently, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (OUP, 2006)).

Rachel Pechey is Research Officer at the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity, University of Oxford. She graduated from the University of Durham, taking Psychology with Mathematics, and completed her MSc and PhD at Cardiff University. Her initial work focused on investigating subclinical symptoms of psychosis (in particular, delusions) in the general population. Subsequently she became involved in obesity research, in particular, looking at political and economic factors that have been implicated in the development of obesity at the population level.


Stanley Ulijaszek is Professor of Human Ecology and Director, Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity, at the University of Oxford, and Vice-Master of St Cross College Oxford. He is associate editor of Homo. Journal of Comparative Human Biology, and book review editor of the Journal of Biosocial Science. He graduated from the University of Manchester in Biochemistry, and took his PhD at the University of London (King's College). His work on nutritional ecology and anthropology has involved fieldwork and research in Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, Sarawak and South Asia.