Susan Hirsch
Susan F. Hirsch is Associate Professor in the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) at George Mason University and founding Director of ICAR’s undergraduate program. From 1990-2004 she taught at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT). Her degrees include a B.A. in Anthropology from Yale University (1982) and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Duke University (1990). Her training in legal anthropology led to research on Islamic law, gender relations, and law, conflict and disputing in East Africa. Fluent in the Swahili language, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kenya and Tanzania since 1985, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, and other institutions and has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Library of Congress. Susan’s latest book, In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief, and a Victim’s Quest for Justice (Princeton University Press, 2007) chronicles her experience attending the trial of four men ultimately convicted of bombing the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998. Her unique ethnography perspective emerges from her position as a survivor of the bombing, a widow of one of its victims, and a legal anthropologist with long-standing interests in trials. In the Moment of Greatest Calamity received the 2007 Herbert Jacob Book Prize awarded by the Law and Society Association. Her academic publications include Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance (co-edited with Mindie Lazarus-Black; Routledge, 1994), Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court (Chicago, 1998) and numerous articles and book chapters on law reform, gender and conflict, reflexive and participatory research, and language in the disputing process. From 1999-2002 she edited PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review and currently serves on the editorial board of the Law and Society Review. Susan’s research interests and public speaking topics include Islamic law in the post-911 era, the politics of capital punishment and victims’ rights, debates over responses to terrorism, and new forms of global justice, including the International Criminal Court. She is President Elect of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a division of the American Anthropological Association.
