Livia Holden
Livia Holden
Livia Holden (PhD, SOAS University of London) is Director of Research at the CNRS and Senior Research Fellow at the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO). She is also Visiting Professor at VinUniversity in Hanoi and Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
She has led several major international and interdisciplinary research projects, including the ERC-funded EURO-EXPERT and CULTEXP projects, devoted to the comparative study, digital documentation, and practical applications of cultural expertise, as well as the ISRF-funded project Cultural Expertise and Litigation in South Asia and Europe. She currently chairs the COST Action K-Peritia: Cultural Expertise Junior Network (2023–2027), a European research network dedicated to developing research, training, professionalisation, and certification in cultural expertise.
Her academic career has included appointments at the Institut des Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne (ISJPS), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Université Paris Nanterre; as Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and College Advisor at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford; as Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Karakoram International University in Gilgit-Baltistan; and as Professor of Anthropology at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). She has also held research and visiting appointments at Griffith University, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and INALCO in Paris.
Holden is a legal anthropologist whose research has developed through long-term fieldwork and comparative socio-legal research in Central India, Pakistan and Gilgit-Baltistan, South Asian diasporas, Europe, and North America. Her work examines the relationships between state and non-state forms of conflict resolution, gender and minority rights, judicial institutions, legal pluralism, expertise, and governance. A central contribution of her research has been the development of cultural expertise as an integrated socio-legal concept for analysing the use of social-scientific knowledge in dispute resolution and the determination of rights. Her work has subsequently extended this framework through large-scale comparative research on how cultural expertise operates across legal systems and institutional settings.
Her publications trace this intellectual trajectory. Her early monograph, Hindu Divorce: A Legal Anthropology (Ashgate, 2008), examined law, gender, and dispute resolution through ethnographic research in Central India. She subsequently edited Cultural Expertise and Litigation: Patterns, Conflicts, Narratives (Routledge, 2011) and Legal Pluralism and Governance in South Asia and Diasporas (Routledge, 2015). Her formulation of cultural expertise as an integrated socio-legal field was developed further in “Beyond Anthropological Expert Witnessing: Toward an Integrated Definition of Cultural Expertise” (2019). More recently, she edited the international reference volume Cultural Expertise, Law, and Rights: A Comprehensive Guide (Routledge, 2023) and published, among other contributions, “People’s Struggle for Participatory Governance in Gilgit-Baltistan” (2023), “The Rise of Cultural Expertise in Litigation” (with Malvika Seth, Ashwin Mishra and Max Steuer, 2024), and “Cultural Expertise and Legal Pluralism in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy” (2024). Her most recent monograph, Cultural Expertise: Theories, Laws, and Practices (Routledge, 2025), brings together the theoretical, methodological, ethical, and practical dimensions of the field and was launched at the Maison Française d’Oxford in March 2026.
A number of the research outputs developed through EURO-EXPERT and CULTEXP have been given a longer-term institutional framework through the establishment of the CULTEXP Foundation within the CNRS Foundation, of which Holden is Director. These include the CULTEXP multimedia and digital research infrastructure, which brings together comparative materials on cultural expertise, including judicial decisions and expert reports. The technological and research outputs associated with CULTEXP received the European Innovation Council Seal of Excellence in both 2024 and 2025.
Holden has received numerous academic distinctions and honours, including Honorary Membership of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) in 2016, a Fellowship at the Institut d’Études Avancées de Nantes (2015–2016), the Pakistan Inter-University Consortium for the Promotion of Social Sciences Award (2016), the Outstanding Woman Academic and Scientist Award supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2021), a Distinguished Professorship appointment at Nagoya University (2024), and a Visiting Professorship at the University of Helsinki (2024).
Her current research builds on this body of work while opening a new interdisciplinary inquiry starting from a critical conceptual genealogy of the state. It examines how authority, legitimacy, governance, and rights are produced in contexts in which sovereignty, territory, citizenship, and state institutions do not necessarily coincide. At the same time, she continues to investigate how digital and AI-based research tools can broaden access to legal knowledge and justice while safeguarding personal data and the rights of minoritised communities and Indigenous peoples.
An initial milestone in this developing research agenda is the international conference Cultural Expertise and the State, convened by Holden at the Maison Française d’Oxford on 24–25 September 2026. Bringing together scholars working across anthropology, law, political theory, international relations, and related fields, the conference examines cultural expertise not only as a form of expert knowledge used within legal institutions, but also as a lens through which to reconsider the production and boundaries of state authority. The event is supported by COST and facilitated by the CNRS–INSHS 2026 SMI international mobility programme.