Meet the Director
Richard Wilson on sabbatical leave from January 2009 until August 2010 on Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Connecticut Provost's office.
During this period, Dr. Eleni Coundouriotis is serving as the Acting Director of the Human Rights Institute.
Richard Wilson
RICHARD A. WILSON is the Gladstein Distinguished 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 books Maya Resurgence in Guatemala (1995) and The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (2001) and the 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). Presently he holds a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is writing a book on ‘Judging History: the use of historical and social science evidence in international criminal trials’.
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, in the United Kingdom. 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. Presently he is the Chair of the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the US Civil Rights Commission and is a member of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Rights.