Juan Obarrio is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
He holds a PhD from Columbia University (2007).
Juan Obarrio works in the fields of critical theory and political anthropology, focusing on issues of state, democracy, law, violence, magic; and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Southern Africa and South America.
He has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has been a visiting professor in Paris, Johannesburg, and Buenos Aires. He is the author of The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique (2014), Corps Etranger (2014), A Matter of Time: A Secret State of Things in Northern Mozambique (forthcoming), and co-editor of African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, Possibility (2016).