
Contact Information
Biography
Arzoo Osanloo is a Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice and the Director of the UW’s Middle East Center. She also holds adjunct appointments in the School of Law and the Departments of Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Religion. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University in 2002. Prior to that, she practiced law, having received by J.D. from The American University in 1993.
As a former immigration and asylum/refugee attorney, Professor Osanloo became concerned with the fraught but often neglected relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘rights.’ As a legal anthropologist, her research and teaching focus on the intersection of law, culture, and politics, including human rights and humanitarianism. Her research explores the formations of women’s rights and human rights in cultural contexts and draws on continuing ethnographic fieldwork in Iran. Her first project explored the politicization of 'rights talk' and women’s subjectivities in post-revolutionary Iran, and resulted in the book, The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran (Princeton University Press, 2009). Her courses focus on human rights, refugee rights and identity, humanitarianism, post-conflict reconciliation, and women’s rights in Muslim societies.
Professor Osanloo is currently working on a new research project that examines the Islamic mandate of forgiveness, compassion, and mercy in Iran’s criminal sanctioning system, jurisprudential scholarship, and everyday acts among pious Muslims. This new research project considers the Muslim mandate of forgiveness or forbearance as a central ordering component of an Islamic way of life. Her interest is not simply in the texts of the sources, Qur'an and Hadiths, but also in how pious Muslims practice forgiveness, forbearance, mercy, and compassion in everyday life. That is, how does this compulsion to Muslims manifest through social interaction, law, and states politics? Iran’s criminal sanctioning laws are one specific focus of this work, laws which permit individual forgiveness (not to be confused with the state pardon). One of the aims of this study will be to appraise the relationship between the legal and social manifestation of forgiveness to a certain understanding of human rights. In addition, the work will assess how the Muslim compulsion to forgive and forbear may potentially play a role in reconciliation and transitional justice, and how gender (symbolically and literally) figures into forgiveness.
Besides working on book projects, Professor Osanloo has published in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Iranian Studies.
Research
Selected Research
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2015. "Framing Rights: Women and Family Law in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Iran." New Middle Eastern Studies, 5, 1-18
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2020. Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims' Rights in Iran. Princeton University Press.
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2019. “The Law Knows No Shame: On Robert Redfield’s ‘Primitive Law’ and the Persistence of Honor in Contemporary Societies,” American Anthropologist 121(3):729-733, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13300. Download PDF
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2014. “From Status to Rights: The Shifting Dimensions of Women’s Affairs and Family Law in Iran.” In Feminist Activism, Women's Rights and Legal Reform, Mulki Al-Sharmani, ed. London: ZED Books. Pp. 125-150.
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2014. “Les pratiques sociales et légales du pardon dans le système judiciaire iranien,” in Justice, Religion, Réconciliation. Yazid Ben Hounet, Sandrine Lefranc & Deborah Puccio-Den, eds. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan. Collection « La religion en question ». Pp. 83-94.
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2014. “Khomeini’s Legacy on Women’s Rights and Roles in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in A Critical Introduction to Khomeini. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 239-255.
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2014. “Crime and Reconciliation: Women’s Peace Initiatives in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in Women and Peace in the Islamic World: Gender, Agency and Influence. Yasmin Saikia and Chad Haines, eds. London: I.B. Tauris. Pp. 224-245.
- Arzoo Osanloo. 2009. The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran. Princeton University Press.
Research Advised
- Spencer, Sydney. "Cycles of Abuse: Legal Strategies for Helping Victims of Sex Trafficking in the U.S." University of Washington. Department of Law, Societies, and Justice, 2025.
- Vierra, Sofia. “Of Love and Longing: The Role of Emotion in Family Reunification Based Immigration." University of Washington. Department of Law, Societies, and Justice, 2025.
- Nasrulai, Anusha. "Narrowing and Broadening Racial Identity: Exploring Middle Eastern American Immigrants’ Identity Formation Through a Social Race Construction Framework". Law, Societies & Justice, University of Washington, 2021.