About

Adam R. Rosenblatt is a Professor of the Practice of the International Comparative Studies Program at Duke University. He serves as the Director of the Duke Human Rights Center at FHI and holds the position of Associate Professor of the Practice in Cultural Anthropology within the Graduate Liberal Studies program. His contact information includes an email address at adam.r.rosenblatt@duke.edu and a physical office location at the Ics Program, 1304 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0405. Additional contact details include a phone number, 919-684-3222, and an email for the Duke Graduate Liberal Studies program, dukegls@duke.edu. The page provides no further details about his research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• History
• Archaeology
• Engineering ethics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• “How can the dead consent?”: Reclamation, research, and the right to say nothing

  Feminist Anthropology · 2026-04-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay explores the ethical and political dilemmas of conducting research on the dead, particularly those whose lives were shaped by marginalization, trauma, and erasure. Drawing on experiences from the classroom, fieldwork in mass graves and marginalized cemeteries, and community‐based reclamation projects, I examine how the dead emerge as figures of fugitive agency—present but resistant, unavailable to the forms of consent and legibility demanded by institutional research ethics. Inspired by student insights, Indigenous and Black studies scholarship on refusal and fugitivity, and feminist relational ethics, I argue that the dead challenge dominant models of research participation and accountability. While the essay is primarily written in prose, it also includes comics illustrations that reflect on silence, refusal, and the limits of representation. Across these varied research contexts and multiple modes of scholarship, I ask what it might mean to honor the dead's right to say nothing—and how researchers might dwell ethically within that silence.

  PublisherDOI

• Whose humanitarianism, whose forensic anthropology?

  2023-02-10 · 5 citations

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  Reframing forensic anthropology's responsibility to recognize the continuum of violence stands to influence approaches to local and international casework, research, and public outreach. Drawing on their research and experiences around burial sites in Uganda's war in Acholiland, the mass institutionalization and anonymous burials of people labeled mentally ill and disabled in the United States, and Canada's genocide in Indian Country using a system of assimilatory forced displacement in a residential school system, the authors move beyond dichotomous notions of humanitarian or human rights anthropology and expand the bounds of meaningful and thoughtful forensic practice. In doing so, they acknowledge the transformation that forensic humanitarian action and its many diverse practitioners have brought to forensic anthropology and human rights activism. The authors focus on the idea that violence against the remains impacts the living, the dead, and the scenarios in which the tangible remains necessitate action among the living.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chapter 1. The Stakeholders in International Forensic Investigations

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Engineering ethics
  • Engineering
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Autism, Advocacy Organizations, and Past Injustice

  Disability Studies Quarterly · 2018-12-21 · 27 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Fruitful connections can be made between Disability Studies and post-conflict transitional justice, two areas of scholarship concerned with human rights and the impacts of violence that have rarely been brought into critical dialogue with one another. For over a decade, one of the world's largest and best-known autism organizations, the US-based Autism Speaks, has been subject to criticisms and boycotts by autistic self-advocates and their allies. This article describes the forms of harm attributed to the organization, arguing that these harms can be viewed through the lens of what transitional justice scholar Jill Stauffer calls "ethical loneliness": "the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard" (2015b, 1). I argue that Autism Speaks's recent reforms and responses to criticism, in focusing largely on present-day organizational policies and structures, fail to grasp the full temporal dimensions of ethical loneliness or the importance of addressing past injustice.

  PublisherDOI

• The Danger of a single story about forensic humanitarianism

  Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine · 2018-11-15 · 27 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Known Unknowns: Forensic Science, the Nation-State, and the Iconic Dead

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2017-01-05 · 10 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Civic Engagement with the Dead: Notes on Theory and Practice in a Forensic Key

  2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Accounting for the Missing: Forensic Anthropology, Human Rights, and the Politics of Measurement

  The 85th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Atlanta, GA · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Sacred Graves and Human Rights

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014-04-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Exhuming Equality: The Forensics of Human Rights

  2013-12-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Wagner

  Queen's University Belfast

  1 shared

• Andrea A. Lunsford

  1 shared