Richard Ashby Wilson

Richard Ashby Wilson is an American-British social anthropologist of law and human rights. He is the Gladstein Distinguished Professor of Human Rights and Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of Connecticut. Wilson established the interdisciplinary Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut and was the Director of the Human Rights Institute from 2003 to 2013. Wilson is one of the founders of the anthropology of human rights and was editor and an author of Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), the first edited volume in the field of the anthropology of human rights.
Wilson argued that anthropology needed to go beyond the universalism/relativism debate and study empirically the globalization of human rights in specific locales. Wilson’s subsequent work in the anthropology of law has analyzed the operation of national truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal courts. His recent book Writing History in International Criminal Trials (Cambridge University Press, 2011) was selected by Choice Magazine as an "Outstanding Academic Title" in January 2012. In "Writing History in International Criminal Trials", Wilson examines the role that history plays in international criminal proceedings.