Denis Regnier is an Assistant Professor and Head of Humanities and Social Sciences at UGHE. An anthropologist with extensive research experience, he has held postdoctoral positions at the École normale supérieure in Paris and the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) in Brussels, as well as teaching positions at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the University of French Polynesia. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate in Paris and gained an MSc in the Anthropology of Learning and Cognition and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Dr. Regnier has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the stigmatization of slave descendants in Highland Madagascar, with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the LSE, the F.R.S.-FNRS, and the European Research Council. He is the author of Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands (Routledge, 2022).

Dr. Regnier’s initial interests in social inequality, rural livelihoods, and traditional healing have broadened to global health and social justice issues. At UGHE he is bringing his anthropological expertise to bear on the training of a new generation of global health professionals and on interventions seeking to improve primary health care in poor rural settings and the well-being of underserved communities.