Kamari Maxine Clarke (MA ’94, anthropology) (Ph.D. ’97, anthropology)

Dr. Kamari Maxine Clarke (MA ’94, anthropology) (Ph.D. ‘97, anthropology) is the distinguished professor of transnational justice and sociolegal studies at the University of Toronto. With over 25 years of research on legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism, and the politics of globalization and race, she has explored theoretical questions of culture and power in anthropology, law, and the study of religion. Professor Clarke has authored nine books and over 55 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including Fictions of Justice (2009) and Affective Justice (2019), the latter winning the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize and being a finalist for the 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award.

One of her current projects investigates the use of geospatial technology to track mass atrocity violence and build human rights cases, focusing on the democratization of evidence and the role of big data and digital tools in humanitarian crises. Her empirical ethnographic data from Mexico, Nigeria, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) examines how new forms of data are transformed into contested evidence within legal environments. She is also working on a project examining the Problem of Absence-Presence in the Black Atlantic World and is interested in knowledge, method, and transmission as ways to foreground an Otherwise approach to Black social life.

Since 1999, Professor Clarke has held faculty positions at Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, UC Los Angeles, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto. She has trained a new generation of scholars impacting legal and anthropological scholarship and practice. Clarke has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including from the National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence in anthropology. She is also a member of the Royal Canadian Society’s Academy of Social Science.