Kamari Maxine Clarke holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz (1997) and a Master in the Study of Law from Yale Law School (2002) and a BA from Concordia University (1988).  She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto and the Interim Director of the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies (CDTS).  She holds joint faculty appointments at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, The Faculty of Law, and the Department of Anthropology.  She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the anthropology department with an affiliation at the Promise Institute for Human Rights.  

For more than twenty years, she has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of race and globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions concerning culture and power and detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems.  One of her key academic contributions has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a technical advisor to the African Union (AU) legal counsel and produced policy reports to help the AU navigate various international law and United Nations challenges.  She has also served as associate editor for the American Anthropologist, the field’s flagship journal and serves on a range of editorial and advisory boards. 

Clarke has published nine books (3 monographs and 6 edited volumes) with over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters.  She is the author of Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (2019, Duke), Fictions of Justice (Cambridge, 2010), and Mapping Yorùbá Networks (Duke, 2004). Clarke is the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize, as well as the 2019 finalist for the Elliot Skinner book award for her latest book, Affective Justice (Duke, 2019). She is also a recipient of a Distinguished Chair in Transnational Justice sand Socio-legal Studies and a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence.