Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France on the chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies. He is also the James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Previously professor at the University of Paris North, he was the founding director of IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences at CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he conducted extensive research in Senegal, South Africa, Ecuador, and France. After years spent as assistant professor in internal medicine and public health, he turned to the social sciences, initially developing research in a domain he described as a political anthropology of health. Later, being laureate of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, he elaborated a political and moral anthropology which he put to work through a ten-year ethnography of police, justice and prison. He then developed a critical engagement with philosophical approaches to punishment, which was the matter of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, and to life, which was the topic of his Adorno Lectures, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.
He also gave the inaugural Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers on resentment and ressentiment, the Tumin Lecture at Princeton on the life of things, the Eric Wolf Lecture at the University of Vienna on conspiracy theories, the Bernt Lambert Memorial Lecture at Cornell on legal anthropology, the Roger Hood Lecture at Oxford on border violence, and two inaugural lectures at the Collège de France titled The Inequality of Lives and The Social Sciences in Times of Crisis. The first social scientist to be granted the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, he developed a program on crisis and its multiple meanings on a global scale, which was the topic of his Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. Frequently intervening in the media, in schools, in professional institutions and in front of general audiences on issues related to his research, he has proposed a theoretical reflection on the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented in his recipient lecture for the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
He created a Summer Program in Social Science for early-career scholars from the Global South at the Institute for Advanced Study. Former Vice-President of Médecins Sans Frontières, he is President of the French Medical Committee for Exiles. Having been on the Scientific Council of the City of Paris for fifteen years, he is a member of the National Ethics Advisory Committee for Health Sciences. Elected at the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Europaea, he has Honorary Doctorates from the University of Liège and the Free University of Brussels. In 2025, he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal, which is the highest distinction of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
His most recent work focuses on the political violence experienced by migrants and refugees along their journey, based on research conducted at the border between Italy and France, and on the moral failure characterizing the international reactions to the destruction of Gaza and decimation of its population. They have resulted in scientific publications and two series of lectures as well as conferences at the Collège de France.
He authored twenty-four books translated in thirteen languages and edited thirty collective volumes. He occasionally writes for The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, La Repubblica, Le Monde, Libération, and is a regular contributor to Alternatives Économiques.
BROADCASTS IN THE FORM OF INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHIES:
Conversations with history, ‘Ethnography and Theory with Didier Fassin’ (in English)
À voix nue, ‘Didier Fassin, Panser la vie’, France Culture (five episodes, in French)
Les possédés et leurs mondes, Anthropologie, ‘Didier Fassin’ (eight episodes, in French)
Institutional webpages:
Collège de France
Institute for Advanced Study
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
DIDIER FASSIN 