Professor Toby Kelly is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Science. He was appointed Director of IASH in 2026.
Toby works at the intersection of anthropology, history and socio-legal studies. He has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites, but over last the last fifteen years he has increasingly focused on the UK in a global perspective. His interests include human rights documentation, the prohibition of torture, and freedom of conscience, and he has published widely on these topics. Running throughout his work has been an emphasis on the wider social and cultural significance of legal claims. Most recently he has started research on the history of private detectives, using their work to examine questions of privacy, freedom of information and techniques of investigation. Throughout, he has been deeply interested in the politics of different types of knowledge production, and his work has combined a range of sources, including ethnography, archival work, oral history, and the analysis of creative art.
He has held various leadership roles across the University, including Head of Social Anthropology, Director of Research in the School of Social and Political Science, and as academic staff member on the University Court.