Claire Moon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, a member of LSE Human Rights and an Associate of LSE’s Latin America and Caribbean Centre. She has degrees in literature, international relations, and politics. Her research engages with broad themes such as the nation, justice, atrocities and human rights. It spans the sociologies of politics, violence, knowledge, science and death. She has published widely on topics such as transitional justice, political reconciliation, reparations, war trauma, human rights, humanitarianism, forensics, and deathwork. She is the author of Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently writing a new book on the history, politics and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves. Claire is also conducting research on the denial of atrocities and the stigmatisation of victims in Mexico’s ongoing ‘war on drugs’.
Claire currently holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award for her project Human Rights, Human Remains: Forensic Humanitarianism and the Politics of the Grave (2018-2022). The project investigates the history of forensic humanitarianism, mass graves in the context of Mexico’s current war against organised crime, and the question of whether we can argue that the dead have human rights.
Watch a short film on Claire's research project
Claire is the winner of five LSE teaching prizes.
Selected publications
Books
Moon, Claire Extraordinary Deathwork (manuscript in preparation).
Moon, Claire (2009) Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books).
Special Issues
Moon, Claire with Frances Heidensohn, Gillian Stevenson, Fran Tonkiss and Richard Wright (eds.) Special 60th Anniversary Issue of British Journal of Sociology, ‘The BJS: shaping sociology over 60 years’, 61/s1.
Articles and chapters
Moon, Claire (forthcoming) ‘What we talk about when we talk about transitional justice. And what we don’t’ in Alexander Laban Hinton, Lawrence Douglas and Jens Meierhenrich (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moon, Claire and Javier Treviño-Rangel (2021) ‘¿Como procesa la población mexicana la guerra contra las drogas?’, Nexos, April 29.
Moon, Claire and Javier Treviño-Rangel (2020) ‘“Involved in something (involucrado en algo)”: denial and stigmatization in Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’’, British Journal of Sociology, 71/4: 722-740.
Moon, Claire (2020) ‘Extraordinary deathwork: new developments in, and the social significance of, forensic humanitarian action’ in Roberto C. Parra, Sara C. Zapico and Douglas H. Ubelaker (eds.) Humanitarian Forensic Science: Interacting with the Dead and the Living. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.
Moon, Claire (2020) ‘What remains? Human rights after death’ in Kirsty Squires, David Errickson and Nicholas Márquez-Grant (eds.) Ethical Challenges in the Analysis of Human Remains. New York: Springer.
Renshaw, Layla, Marina Álamo Bryan, Zuzanna Dziuban and Claire Moon (2020) ‘Tools in the search for human remains’ in The Secret Life of Objects, ISRF Bulletin XXI.
Moon, Claire (2020) ‘Los derechos humanos de los muertos’, Observatorio del Desarollo. Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. 25/26.
Moon, Claire (2018) ‘Politics, deathwork and the rights of the dead’, Humanity, 9th November
Moon, Claire (2017) ‘The biohistory of atrocity and the social life of human remains’ in Christopher M. Stojanowski and William N. Duncan (eds.)StudiesinForensicBiohistory: AnthropologicalPerspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 267-287.
Moon, Claire (2016) ‘Human rights, human remains: Forensic humanitarianism and the human rights of the dead’, InternationalSocialScienceJournal, 65/215-216: 49-63.
Moon, Claire (2013) ‘Interpreters of the dead: Forensic knowledge, human remains and the politics of the past’, SocialandLegalStudies, 22/2: 149-169.
Moon, Claire (2013) ‘Looking without seeing, listening without hearing: Cohen, denial and human rights’, Crime, MediaandCulture, 9/2: 193-196.
Moon, Claire (2012) ‘“What one sees and how one files seeing”: reporting atrocity and suffering’, Sociology, 46/5: 876-890.
Moon, Claire (2012) ‘“Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?” Compensation, social control and social suffering’, SocialandLegalStudies, 21/2: 187-199.
Moon, Claire (2011) ‘The crime of crimes and the crime of criminology: genocide, criminology and Darfur, BritishJournalofSociology, 62/1: 49-55.
Moon, Claire (2010) ‘The British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s: discontent and disarray?’, in Frances Heidensohn, Claire Moon, Gillian Stevenson, Fran Tonkiss and Richard Wright (eds.), BritishJournalofSociology, Special 60th Anniversary Issue, 61/s1: 261-269.
Moon, Claire (2010) ‘Narrar la reconciliación política: verdad y reconciliación en Sudáfrica, in Cecilia Macón and Laura Cucchi (eds.) MapasDeLaTransición: LapolíticadespuésdelterrorenAlemania, Chile, España, Guatemala, SudáfricayUruguay (Buenos Aires: Ladosur): 61-85.
Moon, Claire (2009) ‘Healing past violence: traumatic assumptions and therapeutic interventions in war and reconciliation’, JournalofHumanRights, 8/1: 71-91.
Moon, Claire (2009) ‘Transitional amnesty and justice and reconciliation’, SocialandLegalStudies, 18/4: 561-564.
Moon, Claire (2008) ‘Amnesty’ in Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (eds), NewOxfordCompaniontoLaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 30.
Moon, Claire (2007) ‘States of acknowledgement: the politics of memory, apology and therapy’ in David Downes et al (eds.), Crime, SocialControlandHumanRights: frommoralpanicstostatesofdenial. EssaysinhonourofStanCohen (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing): 314-329.
Moon, Claire (2006) ‘Reconciliation as therapy and compensation: a critical analysis’, in Scott Veitch and Emilios Christodoulidis (eds.) Law, TimeandReconciliation (London: Ashgate): 163-184.
Moon, Claire (2006) ‘Narrating political reconciliation: truth and reconciliation in South Africa’, SocialandLegalStudies, 15/2: 257-275.
Moon, Claire (2004) ‘Prelapsarian state: forgiveness and reconciliation in transitional justice’, InternationalJournalfortheSemioticsofLaw, 17/2: pp 185-197.
Moon, Claire (2002) ‘From separation to interpenetration: a bi-national state in Palestine/Israel? A response to Eyal Weizman’, openDemocracy, July 9.