The Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group (FRSG) is an interdisciplinary research and publication body founded in 1998 in the University of Oxford by Dr Soraya Tremayne and Professor David Parkin. At its inception the group was based in the School of Anthropology at the Institute of Social Anthropology, but with time it has grown to have an international membership as its seminars, meetings, workshops, and publications have built on collaborations with other institutions. FRSG has thus provided a venue for the research of social and medical anthropologists, historians, demographers, sociologists, epidemiologists and several medical disciplines. Within Oxford the group provides lecture series for the Institute of Reproductive Sciences (Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health), and is core to teaching in demography, anthropology, and health in the Institute of Human Sciences. Its members carry out research in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust, the ESRC, the British Academy, the Australian Research Council and other major funding bodies.

 

Since 2010, Dr Philip Kreager has been the group’s director, Current senior members include Dr Nadine Beckmann, Dr Yuliya Hilevich, Dr Konstantina Isidoros, Dr Susie Kilshaw, Dr Siân Pooley, Dr Kaveri Qureshi, Dr Elizabeth Rahman, Professor Alison Shaw, Dr Paula Sheppard, Dr. Laura Sochas and Dr Soraya Tremayne. Its major publications include the Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality series with Berghahn Books (now numbering over 50 volumes), major Oxford University Press syntheses (The Anthropological Demography of Health (2020) and Low Fertilities in the Past and Present (in press)), and special issues of journals such as the Women’s Studies International Forum. Group seminars in recent years have enjoyed collaboration with the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology; the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle; the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society, and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (both Oxford); and the Université Paris Descartes/Centre Population et Développement.

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FRSG’s aim is to promote research and publication on the anthropology of fertility, reproduction, and health, with emphasis on interdisciplinary perspectives and methods. Examples of seminar themes addressed by the group include links between fertility and sexuality, anthropological demography, migration, cousin marriage, generational change, religion, reproductive ecology, identity, adoption, infant feeding and nutrition, infertility, and ageing.

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