Robin Conley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Marshall University.

She received her PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation investigates how jurors make decisions in Texas death penalty trials, focusing on how language constructs defendants as particular legal, moral and cultural subjects and how these constructions influence jurors’ decisions.  She has published additional research addressing the legal, medical and linguistic constraints on transgendered identity construction and the narrative tools actual jurors use to make decisions in Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. Her research and teaching emphasize legal and institutional discourse, violence and empathy in democratic processes, ethnographic methods and theory, and gender and language in society.

 

Curriculum Vitae

 

Selected publications:

Conley, R. (under contract). Executing Language: Discourses of rationality and empathy in jurors’ death penalty decisions. Oxford University Press.

Conley, R. (forthcoming, 2013). Living with the Decision that Someone Will Die: Linguistic distance and empathy in jurors’ death penalty decisions. Language in Society.

Conley, R. & J.M. Conley (2009). Stories from the Jury Room: How jurors use narrative to process evidence. Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 49(2).

Conley, R. (2008). “At the time she was a man”: The temporal dimension of identity construction. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 31(1):28-47.

 

Selected courses:

Linguistic Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology

Law, Culture & Society

Language, Gender and the Body

Theory in Ethnology: Anthropological Knowledge and Authority