RUSSELL BELK is Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and has also held positions at the University of Utah, Temple University, and the University of Illinois. In addition he has had visiting appointments at universities in Canada, the U.S., the UK, Sweden, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Romania, Australia, and New Zealand. He is past president of the International Association of Marketing and Development, and is a fellow, past president, and Film Festival co-founder in the Association for Consumer Research. He has received the Paul D. Converse Award, the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Award for Long Term Contribution to Consumer Research, two Fulbright Fellowships, and honorary professorships on four continents. He has over 400 publications and his research involves the meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-giving, materialism, and global consumer culture. His work is often cultural, visual, qualitative, and interpretive and has been conducted in more than two dozen countries. He has focused his cultural research on such marketing and development topics as globalization, Westernization, international tourism, development of new elites, consumer envy, consumer desires, international art marketing, emerging global consumer holidays, migration, consumer ethics, religious consumption, ethnicity, prostitution, beverage consumption, and funeral consumption. He is currently working on projects involving possession clutter, skin color and skin lightening, luxury consumption, sharing, advertising in old Shanghai, and gendered spaces and possessions in Muslim homes in the Middle East.