The Human Rights Institute
Director

RICHARD A. WILSON is Gladstein Chair of Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.

He is the author of numerous works on human rights, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals, including the monographs Maya Resurgence in Guatemala (1995) and The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (2001, Cambridge University Press) and six edited or co-edited books; Low Intensity Democracy (1993) Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), Culture and Rights (2001), Human Rights in Global Perspective (2003), Human Rights and the ‘War on Terror’ (2005) and 'Humanitarianism and Suffering: the mobilization of empathy (2008, Cambridge University Press).

He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Oslo, the New School for Social Research and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has served as a consultant for intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and was a member of a technical committee that produced the Report Children and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, presented to the UN Security Council in 2002. Presently he is writing a comparative study of the use of historical and social science evidence at three international criminal tribunals (ICTY, ICTR, ICC). He was the Founding Editor of the Journal of Anthropological Theory and presently serves on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Transitional Justice, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Social Justice.

Richard A. Wilson obtained his BSc. and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and previously taught sociology and social anthropology at the University of Essex and the University of Sussex, UK.

Curriculum Vitae