Biography

Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. An anthropologist and a sociologist, he has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, illuminating important issues about the AIDS epidemic, social inequalities in health and the changing landscape of global health. He later conducted research in political and moral anthropology, analyzing the reformulation of injustice and violence as suffering and trauma, and the expansion of an international humanitarian government. He recently made a contribution to an anthropology of the state, through an ethnography of police, justice and prison.His most recent work is on punishment, which he presented for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Berkeley, and on life, which was the matter of the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt.