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Chris Knight (born 1942), until recently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of East London, is a founding member of the Radical Anthropology Group. Taught by Alan Barnard and Mary Douglas, he gained his PhD in 1987 at the University of London for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume Mythologiques.

Knight is best-known for his theory that human language, religion and culture emerged in the human species not simply by gradual Darwinian evolution but in a process culminating in revolutionary social change.

Knight published his first book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture in 1991. Since then, he has been a major figure in debates on the origins of human symbolic culture and especially the origins of language.

Knight was a founder editor of the journal Labour Briefing and has a long record of political activism. During the build-up to the 2009 G-20 Summit in London, his involvement in a street theatre group known as The Government of the Dead led the Corporate Management Team at the University of East London to charge him with 'gross professional misconduct', 'insubordination' and 'bringing the university into disrepute'. He was suspended on 27 March 2009 and despite a petition signed by 600 academics and others was 'summarily dismissed' on July 22 2009. He is now a visiting lecturer and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Comenius, Bratislava, Slovakia.

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