Profile

Jasmine Samara is a legal scholar and social anthropologist whose work explores debates on law, rights and identity politics. She received a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2018 and has a J.D. from Columbia Law School. Her teaching interests focus on law, politics, and identity, and she has taught courses on law and religion; sports, politics, and belonging; and interdisciplinary research methods. Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked at human rights organizations and as a lawyer in law firms, and she draws on this experience to study lawyers’ professional cultures. Her ethnographic research has examined how Greek lawyers and rights activists debate the distinctive state policies that govern Muslim minority citizens, and how citizens adapt to or evade these policies. Drawing on her interdisciplinary experience, she encourages students to explore diverse sites, from sports to television shows, in which to study evolving public debates on law and policy.