Meet the Director
Richard Wilson
RICHARD A. WILSON is the Gladstein Chair of Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology and Law and Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, which he founded in 2003. Richard A. Wilson obtained his BSc. and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and prior to joining the Connecticut faculty, he held faculty positions at the universities of Essex and Sussex in the United Kingdom. His scholarship and policy work has focused on international human rights, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals and he has used an anthropological and empirical approach to try to understand the ways in which national and international legal institutions write historical accounts of human rights violations and pursue reconciliation. His publications include the books Maya Resurgence in Guatemala (1995) and The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (2001) and a number of edited or co-edited books including Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), Culture and Rights (2001), Human Rights and the ‘War on Terror’ (2005) and Humanitarianism and Suffering: the Mobilization of Empathy (2008). In 2009-10, he held a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, during which time he completed his forthcoming book Writing History in International Criminal Trials (2011, Cambridge University Press). Wilson teaches “Contemporary Debates in Human Rights” in Storrs and “Post-Conflict Justice” at the School of Law in Hartford. 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 Commission on Civil Rights. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Rights.