Maxine Kamari Clarke

M. Kamari Clarke is a professor at the University of Los Angeles in the Department of Anthropology. Over her career she has taught at Yale University (1999–2012), the University of Pennsylvania (2012-2014), Carleton University (2015–2019), the University Toronto (2014–2015, 2020), and was the former chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale (2007–2010). For more than twenty years, she conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism and the politics of globalisation and race. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions of culture and power and in the field of law and anthropology detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key contributions to the various disciplines that she inhabits has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. By mapping the way that particular cultural forms travel, and by highlighting why and how some travel more than others, she has quickly established herself as a leader in this area and a central interlocutor into new ways of managing power and regulating social practices.