As previously announced, Professor Kamari Clarke will serve as Director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, effective January 1, 2024, until December 31, 2028.
Professor Clarke steps into the role after serving as the Centre’s Acting Director December 7-31, 2023.
Clarke was awarded her PhD in Anthropology by the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997. With degrees in Political Science, Anthropology and later a Master in the Study of Law, over the past twenty-five years she has served as a professor at Yale University, then visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and The University of California Los Angeles. She has conducted research on issues related to international criminal institutions and theoretical questions of culture, power, law and the state. And as an intellectual leader in shaping the 21st century field of sociolegal studies, and the anthropologies of transnational justice and globalization, she has produced interdisciplinary scholarship with powerful implications for theory, public policy and daily life. She is the is the author of nine books and over fifty-five peer reviewed articles and book chapters, including her 2009 publication of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Affective Justice (with Duke University Press, 2019), which was the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize.
Professor Clarke comes to the directorship with a track record of significant leadership. In 2000, she served as the general secretary of the Association of Africanist Anthropologists within the American Anthropological Association, and recently the Associate Editory for Cultural Anthropology of American Anthropologist (2015-2020), one of AAA’s flagship journals. From 2009-2012, while a faculty member at Yale University, she was Yale’s chairperson for the Council on African Studies and later the co-founding director of Yale’s Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis. From 2015-2019 at Carleton University, she was a member of the Carleton Leader Executive Training Program and played a central role in co-building their new Bachelor of Global and International Studies (BGInS) degree program. From July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023 at the University of Toronto she served as Interim Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies (CDTS).
We are happy to have her among our faculty and the incoming director of the Center. Please join us in celebrating Professor Kamari Clarke's appointment and a new chapter for CrimSL under her leadership!