Rate My Professor Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and sociologist who serves as the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Initially trained as a physician at Paris University Pierre et Marie Curie, he practiced internal medicine and taught public health at the Hospital of La Pitié Salpétrière before turning to the social sciences. He completed a Master’s degree at La Sorbonne and a PhD at EHESS, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He became Professor at the University of Paris North and later Director of Studies at EHESS, a position he continues to hold. At CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was the founding director of IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences. In 2009, he was appointed James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2019, he was elected to the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France, and in 2022 he was elected to the permanent chair Moral Questions and Social Issues in Contemporary Societies.

At the crossroads of anthropology and sociology, Fassin has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. His early research in medical anthropology examined power and inequalities, including studies of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa and the development of the conceptual framework of the embodiment of history. As a former vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières, he developed a scientific program on humanitarianism. He has also investigated immigration and asylum policies, and conducted a ten-year ethnography of the French state focused on police, justice, and prison, leading to work on punishment and life. He is the author of twenty-four books and editor or co-editor of twenty-seven collective volumes, with several translated into multiple languages. Fassin has delivered lectures including the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Adorno Lectures, and Page-Barbour Lectures. He has received the Gold Medal in anthropology from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, the Huxley Memorial Medal, and election to the Academia Europaea and the American Philosophical Society. He occasionally writes for outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde, and created a Summer Program in Social Science for early-career scholars from the Global South.