After graduating in Philosophy (First Class) in Malta in 1976, I went to Cambridge, to do an MPhil (Distinction) and a PhD (1981) under Professor Sir Jack Goody. I conducted PhD field research in Cyprus.

1981: elected to a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College (1981-85),
1983: research in Australia for the Commonwealth Government on Migrant and Refugee Youth Unemployment,
1984:: research in Tunisia (property and marriage patterns).
1985: Appointed to a Teaching-Curatorial post at Cambridge. Responsible for the redesign of the Anthropology Displays and Galleries at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (opened 1990)
1991: First book (with Constantina Bada) “The Making of the Modern Greek Family” (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
1991-2: Moved to the Department of Anthropology ( Durham )
1992-94: Secondment to Malta to establish the Anthropology Programme and founded the Journal of Mediterranean Studies.
1997: Appointed Reader in Anthropology, University of Durham. .
2009: Resigned Durham post to take up a Professorship at the University of Malta.

Other field research: southern France (Pezenas) on local elites and “patrimoine” (2005)
Other teaching and Visiting Professorships at: Paris X, Nanterre and Aix-Provence.
Other publications: jointly edited work (with Thierry Fabre): Between Europe and the Mediterranean. The Challenges and the Fears. (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2007).
Monograph: “Bodies of Evidence” (Oxford :Berghahn, 2005), looks at the way the issue of Missing Persons whose bodies were never recovered was framed in Cypriot society.
Other published articles and book chapters on banditry, property transmissions and matrimonial strategies, art, psychoanalysis, and ethnomusicology, and Mediterranean anthropology.
Editor of the Journal, History and Anthropology (1998-2008)