Hiromi Hosoya

Hiromi Hosoya, PhD is a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the Faculty of Letters at Seikei University, Japan. She has also served as Professor at Kobe University, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, and held academic appointments including Fellow at the Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School, Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research, and Visiting Research Fellow at National Museum of Ethnology.

Her research centers on Indigenous cultures in the Peruvian Andes and, more broadly, across Latin America. Her early work on Andean mountain worship, published as The Religious World of the Andes: Contemporary Significance of Mountain Deity Worship in Peru, brought analytical attention to mountain deities—central to Andean belief systems yet previously underexamined—by examining them in relation to Indigenous peoples’ changing lived experiences.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in regions where large-scale massacres of Indigenous populations occurred during Peru’s internal armed conflict, she has investigated Indigenous experiences of violence and survival. Drawing on these empirical studies, she has theorized transitional justice and memory by introducing postcolonial perspectives that critically interrogate the colonial assumptions embedded within these fields.

In a related line of research, she has examined the relationship between emerging Indigenous art and contemporary art, analyzing processes of institutionalization and appropriation in relation to art systems and the global art market.

She has published numerous books and edited volumes in multiple languages, including The Anthropology of “Justice” in a Globalizing World: Legal Formation and Locality in International Society, an interdisciplinary work engaging anthropology and international law.

During her time as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, she conducted research on how United Nations initiatives on Indigenous rights shape concepts of Indigeneity and have implications for Indigenous peoples.