Miriam Ticktin received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before teaching at the New School, Miriam was an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and also held a postdoctoral position in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.

Professor Ticktin works at the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory. Her research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process. As one example of this, her book Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France takes undocumented immigrants as the subject of extensive ethnographic research, and looks at the place of gender, humanitarianism and the body in debates over immigration, primarily in France. Her newest project looks at emerging political and scientific technologies mobilized in the name of suffering -- expanding humanitarianism to ecological and planetary levels -- and how these help to redraw the boundaries between humans and non-humans, and new forms of political inclusion and exclusion. She is co-editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development.