Richard A. 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 University of Essex and the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. Focusing on international human rights, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals, he has drawn upon anthropological and empirical approaches to understand the ways in which national and international legal institutions write historical accounts of human rights violations and pursue reconciliation. Wilson teaches courses in Contemporary Debates in Human Rights and Post-Conflict Justice. 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 serves as chair of the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His books include Maya Resurgence in Guatemala (1995) and The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (2001) and a number of edited or co-edited volumes, 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). During his National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship year, he completed his latest book Writing History in International Criminal Trials, published in 2011 with Cambridge University Press.  Presently he is starting a new research project on the international criminal law of incitement and propaganda.  He is using J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts to evaluate the recent judgments of international tribunals ( e.g., Bikindi, Nahimana at the ICTR) that assert a causal connection between speech acts and crimes against humanity and genocide.