Professor Arzoo Osanloo 

IAS Fellow at Collingwood College, January-March 2027

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Arzoo Osanloo is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University and is co-founder and co-director of the Human Rights Initiative, which seeks to integrate anthropological studies of human rights into the department’s core mission. Professor Osanloo is a legal anthropologist who studies the intersection of law and culture, especially in Iran. She previously worked as an immigration and refugee law attorney. Her books include The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran (2009), which analyzes the politicization of women’s “rights talk” in Iran, and Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victim’s Rights in Iran (2020), which won the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize for new, outstanding work in law and society scholarship. Forgiveness Work examines forbearance in Iran’s victim-centered criminal justice system, which is based in part on the Muslim mandates of forgiveness and mercy. She co-edited Care in a Time of Humanitarianism: Stories of Refuge, Aid, and Repair in the Global South (2024), a volume that grew out of her Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on humanitarian care from the global South, https://www.humanitarianisms.org. Her edited volume, Besieged by Sanctions: Everyday Encounters with Economic Warfare, calling on anthropologists to turn their ethnographic gaze to the study of economic sanctions, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2027. Professor Osanloo is currently working on a monograph that examines the effects of protracted economic sanctions on the lives and relations of ordinary Iranians.

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