William Matthews

William Matthews is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His work focuses on the interplay between cognition, cosmology, and cultural transmission, with a regional emphasis on China. He holds a PhD from University College London (2016), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and has studied modern and classical Chinese at Beijing Language and Culture University.

Matthews' research explores how explicit cosmological concepts vary across societies and interact with human cognition. His book Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology through Chinese Divination (2021) challenges existing anthropological and sinological approaches by arguing that cosmology arises from individual reflection rather than cultural logic. He also guest-edited a 2021 special issue of Social Analysis on divination and ontology, and is Section Editor for History and War in the Routledge Research Encyclopedia of Chinese Studies.

His current project examines political cosmology and imperial state formation in early China, combining qualitative and quantitative text analysis with environmental and socioeconomic factors. Notable awards include a shortlist for the Early Career Researcher Prize (2018). His interdisciplinary work bridges social and biological anthropology, cognitive psychology, and sinology, emphasizing comparative methods.