Kaori O’Connor was an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. She specialised in the anthropology of food, focussing on colonial and post-colonial cultures, particularly those hybrid societies that are a legacy of Empire. Within that, she favoured the use of material culture as an analytical vehicle, and worked on food commodities in all forms, from raw to processed, particularly as they move across time, space and cultures. She also worked on textiles. She wrote widely on these subjects and was a frequent contributor to media on them.
She was working on a cultural history of the Hawaiian Luau (feast) for Oxford University Press, when sadly she died following a short illness in 2022. She will be very fondly remembered.
