Claire Moon is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research and teaching confront broad themes such as death, politics, violence and justice. They span the sociologies of death, the state, politics, atrocity, transitional justice, humanitarianism, human rights, science, knowledge and expertise.
Claire is the author of Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently working on two new book projects. The first of these is entitled Extraordinary Deathwork. It concerns the particular forms of death labour (‘extraordinary deathwork’) that emerged in response to mass violent death in the context of Mexico’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. The second, entitled Human Rights, Human Remains, concentrates on the broader history, politics, practices, and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves. It looks at the dead body as the object of humanitarian concern and action. It asks whether, as a result of historical and contemporary humanitarian activity around the dead, we can now argue that the dead have human rights. These two new books are derived from a major research project funded by the Wellcome Trust entitled Human Rights, Human Remains: Forensic Humanitarianism and the Politics of the Grave (2018-2022). A short film relating to that project entitled ‘Do the dead have human rights?’ can be viewed here.
To support this research, Claire undertook professional training in forensic anthropology (grave exhumation and human skeletal identification) and death management, focussing on human rights investigations, mass disasters, and the humanitarian management of the dead.
Claire’s research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and the LSE. It has informed the development of new international protocols and national and UN reports on mass grave location, protection and exhumation. Claire has also served on the advisory board of a citizen science collective of families of the disappeared in Mexico and continues to collaborate with family organisations searching for their missing relatives.
Claire teaches across a range of programmes at all levels in the Department, including courses driven by her research interests. These include an undergraduate course, SO309 Atrocity and Justice, and a postgraduate course, SO457 Political Reconciliation. She will soon launch a new MSc course entitled The Social and Political Lives of the Dead, tying her longer interests in politics, atrocity and social suffering to her recent research on violent death and deathwork. Claire has supervised PhDs on a range of topics including the military refusenik movement in Israel, state crimes in Mexico, memory and justice in Cambodia, transitional justice in Colombia, state crimes and social movements in Argentina, migrant deaths in Europe, and victim movements in Mexico. Claire is the recipient of a number of teaching prizes, most recently in 2024.
In 2023 Claire established the first association of academics of first generation/working class background at the LSE.
Selected publications
Books
Moon, Claire, Extraordinary Deathwork (manuscript in progress).
Moon, Claire (2009) NarratingPoliticalReconciliation: SouthAfrica’sTruthandReconciliationCommission (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books).
Special Issues
Moon, Claire with Mika Toyota and Kristina Krause (eds.) (forthcoming 2026) ‘Deathwork’. special issue of Mortality, 31/4.
Moon, Claire with Frances Heidensohn, Gillian Stevenson, Fran Tonkiss and Richard Wright (eds.) (2010) Special 60th Anniversary Issue of BritishJournalofSociology, ‘The BJS: shaping sociology over 60 years’, 61/s1.
Articles and chapters
Moon, Claire with Mika Toyota and Kristina Krause (forthcoming 2026) ‘Deathwork: an introduction’. Mortality, 31/4.
Moon, Claire (forthcoming 2025) ‘“You have to negotiate science with the dignity of the body:” Dignity, deathwork, and the effort to turn bad death into good’. Mortality, 31/4.
Moon, Claire (2024) ‘What we talk about when we talk about transitional justice. And what we don’t’ in Alexander Laban Hinton, Lawrence Douglas and Jens Meierhenrich (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moon, Claire and Javier Treviño-Rangel (2021) ‘¿Cómo procesa la población mexicana la guerra contra las drogas?’, Nexos, April 29.
Moon, Claire and Javier Treviño-Rangel (2020) ‘“Involved in something (involucrado en algo)”: denial and stigmatization in Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’’, British Journal of Sociology, 71/4: 722-740. Translated into Spanish in 2023 as ‘“Involucrado en algo”: negación y estigma en la “guerra contra las drogas” de México’. Revista Colombiana de Sociología, 46/1: 327-358.
Moon, Claire (2020) ‘Extraordinary deathwork: new developments in, and the social significance of, forensic humanitarian action’ in Roberto C. Parra, Sara C. Zapico and Douglas H. Ubelaker (eds.) Humanitarian Forensic Science: Interacting with the Dead and the Living. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.
Moon, Claire (2020) ‘What remains? Human rights after death’ in Kirsty Squires, David Errickson and Nicholas Márquez-Grant (eds.) Ethical Challenges in the Analysis of Human Remains. New York: Springer.
Renshaw, Layla, Marina Álamo Bryan, Zuzanna Dziuban and Claire Moon (2020) ‘Tools in the search for human remains’ in The Secret Life of Objects, ISRF Bulletin XXI.
Moon, Claire (2020) ‘Los derechos humanos de los muertos’, Observatorio del Desarollo. Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. 25/26.
Moon, Claire (2018) ‘Politics, deathwork and the rights of the dead’, Humanity, 9th November
Moon, Claire (2017) ‘The biohistory of atrocity and the social life of human remains’ in Christopher M. Stojanowski and William N. Duncan (eds.)StudiesinForensicBiohistory: AnthropologicalPerspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 267-287.
Moon, Claire (2016) ‘Human rights, human remains: Forensic humanitarianism and the human rights of the dead’, InternationalSocialScienceJournal, 65/215-216: 49-63.
Moon, Claire (2013) ‘Interpreters of the dead: Forensic knowledge, human remains and the politics of the past’, SocialandLegalStudies, 22/2: 149-169.
Moon, Claire (2013) ‘Looking without seeing, listening without hearing: Cohen, denial and human rights’, Crime, MediaandCulture, 9/2: 193-196.
Moon, Claire (2012) ‘“What one sees and how one files seeing”: reporting atrocity and suffering’, Sociology, 46/5: 876-890.
Moon, Claire (2012) ‘“Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?” Compensation, social control and social suffering’, SocialandLegalStudies, 21/2: 187-199.
Moon, Claire (2011) ‘The crime of crimes and the crime of criminology: genocide, criminology and Darfur’, BritishJournalofSociology, 62/1: 49-55.
Moon, Claire (2010) ‘The British Journal of Sociology in the 1990s: discontent and disarray?’, in Frances Heidensohn, Claire Moon, Gillian Stevenson, Fran Tonkiss and Richard Wright (eds.), BritishJournalofSociology, Special 60th Anniversary Issue, 61/s1: 261-269.
Moon, Claire (2010) ‘Narrar la reconciliación política: verdad y reconciliación en Sudáfrica, in Cecilia Macón and Laura Cucchi (eds.) MapasDeLaTransición: LapolíticadespuésdelterrorenAlemania, Chile, España, Guatemala, SudáfricayUruguay (Buenos Aires: Ladosur): 61-85.
Moon, Claire (2009) ‘Healing past violence: traumatic assumptions and therapeutic interventions in war and reconciliation’, JournalofHumanRights, 8/1: 71-91.
Moon, Claire (2009) ‘Transitional amnesty, justice and reconciliation’, SocialandLegalStudies, 18/4: 561-564.
Moon, Claire (2008) ‘Amnesty’ in Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (eds), NewOxfordCompaniontoLaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 30.
Moon, Claire (2007) ‘States of acknowledgement: the politics of memory, apology and therapy’ in David Downes et al (eds.), Crime, SocialControlandHumanRights: frommoralpanicstostatesofdenial. EssaysinhonourofStanCohen (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing): 314-329.
Moon, Claire (2006) ‘Reconciliation as therapy and compensation: a critical analysis’, in Scott Veitch (ed.) Law and the Politics of Reconciliation (London: Routledge): 163-184.
Moon, Claire (2006) ‘Narrating political reconciliation: truth and reconciliation in South Africa’, SocialandLegalStudies, 15/2: 257-275.
Moon, Claire (2004) ‘Prelapsarian state: forgiveness and reconciliation in transitional justice’, InternationalJournalfortheSemioticsofLaw, 17/2: pp 185-197.
Moon, Claire (2002) ‘From separation to interpenetration: a bi-national state in Palestine/Israel? A response to Eyal Weizman’, openDemocracy, July 9.