It is with the greatest of excitement that the Department of Anthropology welcomes Arzoo Osanloo and Richard Ashby Wilson to Princeton University.
Arzoo Osanloo is a world-renowned scholar and award-winning author of classic ethnographic studies at the intersection of gender, religion, politics, and Islamic jurisprudence (moving seamlessly from civil to criminal to international law as frames of reference). With a distinguished record of teaching and service, Prof. Osanloo comes to Princeton from the University of Washington, where she was teaching in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice. From 2015 to 2023, Prof. Osanloo directed the Middle East Center at the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Osanloo received her J.D. from American University and, after working for several years as an immigration and asylum/refugee attorney, earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Stanford University. Her appointment is effective August 1, 2025.
Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Iran and the international public sphere, Prof. Osanloo has produced a uniquely rich body of work anchored in her powerful monographs: The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran (Princeton University Press, 2009) and the multi-award-winning Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims' Rights in Iran (Princeton University Press, 2020). Both books have been hailed as groundbreaking contributions to anthropology, legal studies, and Middle Eastern studies. Prof. Osanloo's co-edited book, Care in a Time of Humanitarianism, was recently published by Berghahn Books. She has also published extensively in top-tier anthropology, socio-legal, and area studies journals.
Prof. Osanloo will be teaching two new courses this upcoming Fall 2025 semester: ANT 288 Refugees: Seeking Protection Amid Crisis and Disaster and ANT 510B: Ethnographies of Justice.
Richard Ashby Wilson is one of the world's leading legal anthropologists and an innovative human rights scholar. Prof. Wilson comes to Princeton from the University of Connecticut, where he served as dean of the UConn School of Law from 2021 to 2023 and has taught since 2004, most recently as the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Law and Anthropology and the Gladstein Distinguished Chair of Human Rights. Prof. Willson is the founding director of the University's renowned Human Rights Institute. His appointment is effective September 1, 2025.
A pioneering and immensely prolific ethnographer of law and society, Prof. Wilson is the author or editor of eleven books at the intersection of political violence, criminal courts, human rights institutions, and humanitarianism, including Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes (2017), and Writing History in International Criminal Trials (2011), both for Cambridge University Press. His work has been translated into Chinese, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish, and he has written more than 80 journal articles and book chapters. A consummate public intellectual, Prof. Wilson has authored numerous policy reports and published in major media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, while also serving on several civil rights and government commissions.
Prof. Wilson will be teaching ANT 370 Human Rights and Post-Conflict Justice in Fall 2025 semester.
Beginning this fall, Wilson and Osanloo will be working on a Human Rights Initiative (HRI) housed in the Department of Anthropology. Grounded in the field of legal anthropology – with its human-centered research methodologies and historically informed and globally comparative perspective – the Human Rights Initiative will support socially meaningful scholarship on the most pressing human rights issues of our time (from the suppression of civic space, to inequalities, to the devastating impacts of climate change, to human rights violations associated with migration and conflict).
Through collaborative research, workshops, and teaching, the HRI will focus on issues of justice, equity, and service to humanity. Pedagogically, HRI will be synergistically linked to the popular Law, Polics, and Economics (LPE) track that the department offers to our exponentially growing number of majors. The HRI is committed to educating the next generation of human rights advocates and legal practitioners in a range of fields (social sciences, arts and humanities, engineering, health and environmental sciences, and policy). The initiative is supported by the Office of the Provost and the Center for Human Values.
With these new faculty hires and the Human Rights Initiative, Anthropology is poised to play a central role in the social study of law and human rights on campus and beyond in the years to come.
See University news of new faculty appointments.