R D. Grillo

Ralph Grillo is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex where he was formerly Dean of the School of African and Asian Studies and founding director of the Research Centre for Culture, Development and the Environment. Although he has also written on the anthropology of development and the anthropology of language, he has had a long-standing concern with transnational migration and ethnicity in Africa and Europe (African Railwaymen: Solidarity and Opposition in an African Labour Force, Cambridge 1973; Ideologies and Institutions in Urban France: The Representation of Immigrants, Cambridge 1985, and co-edited special issues of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on Transnational Islam, 2004, and Africa-Europe, A Double Engagement, 2008.

Since the mid-1990s he has focused on cultural diversity and its governance in France, Italy, and the UK (Pluralism and the Politics of Difference: State, Culture, and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, Oxford 1998; The Politics of Recognizing Difference: Multiculturalism Italian Style, co-editor, Ashgate 2002; The Family in Question: Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities in Multicultural Europe, editor, Amsterdam 2008). Since the mid-2000s he has been working with anthropologists, lawyers and political scientists on issues relating to cultural and religious diversity and the law in Europe and North America (Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity, co-editor, Ashgate 2009), with a particular interest in the ‘legal industry’ which has grown up around Islam. Through the Sussex Centre of Migration Research he was actively involved in the European ‘network of excellence’, IMISCOE, and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen, and of the Advisory Board of GENESO (Generational negotiations, social control and gendered sexuality), University of Helsinki.