School of Social and Political Science

Background

Biographical statement

Tobias Kelly is Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

He is a political and legal anthropologist. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2003, and has worked at the Institute of Law of Birzeit University, the Crisis States Programme at the LSE, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University.

He is currently thinking about a new project on private detectives: a cultural and social history of the secrets we want to keep and the ways we find them out.

His most recent book Battles of Conscience is a history of British conscientious objectors and pacifists.  The wider project, funded by the ERC, involved colleagues working on case studies from the UK, Sri Lanka and the former Soviet Union. More details can be found here.

He is co-editor of the Ethnographies of Political Violence series with University of Pennsylvania Press.

For a full list of publications, including Open Access Versions, please see Edinburgh Research Explorer