New York · Santa Cruz · Yale · Toronto
Three decades of socio-legal scholarship.
Graduate training, appointments, and the arc of a research programme on law, sovereignty and global Black politics.
Graduate training
After Concordia she moved to the United States, completing an M.A. in political anthropology at the New School for Social Research in 1993. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997, working under Carolyn Martin Shaw, Steve Caton, Lisa Rofel, Don Brenneis and Angela Davis. She later completed a Master in the Study of Law at Yale Law School in 2003.
The research
Her work follows the complex forces reshaping Africa and the African diaspora after the Cold War, and helped develop the study of globalisation and transnationalism in the Black Atlantic world. Over three decades she has conducted fieldwork in The Hague, Geneva, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica and the United States, showing how international criminal courts, regional tribunals and grassroots reparation movements produce affective economies that reshape global governance.
Appointments & honours
SSHRC Insight Impact Award
Recognising the societal impact of her research on international justice and structural inequality.
Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Inducted into the Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s highest academic recognition.
Guggenheim Fellowship
Supporting her research on the rule of law, evidence and transnational justice.
Distinguished Professor, University of Toronto
Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies, at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.
Affective Justice, Duke University Press
An ethnography of the International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist pushback.
Professor, UCLA
Department of Anthropology; Faculty Fellow, Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA School of Law.
Professor with tenure, Carleton University
Global & International Studies.
Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Anthropology and the Africa Center.
Yale University
Assistant to full Professor of Anthropology; Chair of the Council on African Studies, 2009–2012; co-founder of the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis.
University of California, Berkeley
Anthropology and African American Studies.