Since 2002, John McPeak has been an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration with a courtesy appointment in Economics at Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY. Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher for the Pastoral Risk Management project of the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Program and Cornell University based in Kenya after completing his dissertation on the economics of pastoralism in 1999 in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

is chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His research over the past twenty-three years falls into three general thematic areas: agrarian (pastoral) production systems, marketing, and social organization in East Africa; the social dimensions of environmental degradation and political ecology; and the social effects on rural communities of economic restructuring, globalization, and development. Within these research areas he has had a significant interest in: household and community organizations; social and class differentiation; and land and resource tenure systems.