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Sally Starr Engle Merry (December 1, 1944 – September 8, 2020) was an American anthropologist. She was the Silver Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. In the past, Merry had also been president of the American Ethnological Society, the Law and Society Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. She served as a member of the editorial board of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Early life and education[edit]

Sally Engle was born on December 1, 1944, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[1] She married Paul Henry Merry on June 4, 1967.^[1][2] Merry earned her Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College before earning her Master's degree at Yale University and PhD at Brandeis University.^[3]

Career[edit]

Merry joined the faculty at New York University (NYU) in 2005 after serving as the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas in the Department of Anthropology at Wellesley College.^[4] Her book Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice received the 2010 J. I. Staley Prize.^[5] Two years later, she co-edited Governance by Indicators: Global Power through Quantification and Rankings with three other NYU professors.^[6] In 2013, Merry was the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws from McGill University.^[7] In 2019, she was awarded the Franz Boas prize, the highest accolade bestowed by the American Anthropological Association.^[8]

Merry died on September 8, 2020.^[9]

Publications[edit]

Books[edit]

• 1981 Urban Danger : Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• 1990 Getting Justice and Getting Even : Legal Consciousness Among Working-Class Americans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• 1993 The Possibility of Popular Justice : A Case Study of American Community Mediation. Codirigé avec Neal Milner. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press.
• 2000 Colonizing Hawai'i : The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press.
• 2004 Law and Empire in the Pacific : Hawai'i and Fiji. Codirigé with Donald Brenneis. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM
• 2006 Human Rights and Gender Violence : Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 2007 The Practice of Human Rights : Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local. Codirigé with Mark Goodale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 2008 Gender Violence : A Cultural Introduction. London: Blackwell.
• 2016 "The Seductions of Quantification: measuring human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking", University of Chicago Press
• 2018 "Human rights: transformation in practice", co-edited with Tine Strooper, University of Pennsylvania Press

References[edit]