Biography

Professor Kamari Clarke

Dr. Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies. Her research spans issues related to law, culture, power and inequality. She is the author of nine books and over fifty-five articles, including her 2009 publication of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Affective Justice (with Duke University Press, 2019), which won the finalist prize for the American Anthropological Association’s 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award for the Association for Africanist Anthropology and was the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize.

During her academic career she has served as a technical expert for the African Union and held numerous prestigious fellowships, grants and awards, including multiple grant awards from the National Science Foundation and from The Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Very recently she was a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence in Anthropology and in 2024 she was inducted as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada Academy of Social Sciences. As a scholar engaged in a range of projects related to the Black Atlantic World, she continues to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and broad-based collaborative knowledge on the Problem of Absence-Presence in the Black Atlantic World.