Susan F. Hirsch, a cultural anthropologist, is Associate Professor in the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) at George Mason University and Director of CAR, ICAR’s undergraduate program. From 1990-2004 she taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s Studies Program. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Duke University in 1990. Her training in legal anthropology led to research on conflict and culture, Islam, gender relations, and the legal systems of East Africa. Her book, Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court, is an ethnographic analysis of how gender relations are negotiated through marital disputes heard in Kenyan Islamic courts. Fluent in the Swahili language, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kenya and Tanzania since 1985, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, Wesleyan University, and Duke University, and she has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress (Rockefeller Fellowship), the American Bar Foundation, and Northwestern University’s Law and Social Science Program. Her academic publications include Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance (co-edited with Mindie Lazarus-Black; Routledge, 1994) and numerous articles on law reform, gender and conflict, reflexive and participatory research, and language in the disputing process, in edited volumes and journals, such as Law and Social Inquiry and Africa Today. She was the editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (1999-2002), and is currently on the editorial board of the Law and Society Review and the American Ethnologist.

Susan’s newly released book, titled In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim’s Quest for Justice (Princeton University Press), is a reflexive ethnography of her experiences of 1998 East African Embassy bombings and the subsequent trial of four defendants. She and her husband Abdulrahman Abdullah were running an errand at the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, when the bombings occurred, and he was killed. As a bombings victim Susan began attending the embassy bombings trial in New York City in January, 2001, and over the next six months came to study it as a legal anthropologist. The volume highlights the difficulties experienced by a terror victim who opposes the death penalty yet seeks to participate in a capital trial. Susan’s research interests and public speaking topics include controversies over Islamic law in the post-911 era, the politics of capital punishment and victims’ rights, debates over justice in the current war on terror, and new forms of global justice, such as the International Criminal Court.

Graduate Courses

Undergraduate Courses

Conflict and our World" (CONF 101)

Selected Publications

In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim's Quest for Justice. New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 2006

Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court. Series on Language and Legal Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

In the Moment of Greatest Calamity