Eve Darian-Smith, professor and chair of global and international studies at UC Irvine, has been named the 2024-25 recipient of the J. Ann Tickner Award. The honor, awarded by the International Studies Association, recognizes her efforts “combining bravery in pursuing high-quality, pioneering scholarship that pushes the boundaries of the discipline with a deep commitment to service, especially teaching and mentoring.”

Darian-Smith – who is also an affiliated professor of law, anthropology, and criminology, law and society – has been a member of the UC Irvine faculty since 2017. Since her arrival, she’s successfully formalized the program in international studies – which administers one of the top 20 most popular majors on campus - into a full-fledged department, complete with a Ph.D. program (launched in 2019) in global studies. She’s recruited a cohort of 17 current faculty who are pursuing work that spans the social sciences and humanities and engages the most pressing global issues of the 21st century.

A critical interdisciplinary scholar, her own research focuses on issues of postcolonial and decolonial theory, human rights, legal pluralism, and sociolegal theory with current efforts pointed at authoritarianism and crises of democracy. She’s the author of seven books – three of which are prize winning texts - and seven edited volumes and special issues. Her most recent book, Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford University Press 2022) received recognition as the winner of both the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award and the Silver Medal in Environment, Independent Publishers Award. The award-winning work draws stark connections between extractive capitalism, ultranationalism and catastrophic wildfires that have scorched three countries on three different continents. The resulting devastation and on-going contributions to climate change, she argues, are a global crisis that calls for a new political, economic and moral framework that prioritizes people over profits and a global view that blurs boundaries between lands, seas and atmospheres.

Read more online or watch and listen below as Darian-Smith explains the need to view this issue with a global lens, beginning with the way we think about and through wildfires.

Her forthcoming book, Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press), available in May, explores on-going and increasing threats to academic freedom at home and abroad. The work examines the far-right’s attack on academic freedom and reflects her long-standing interest in higher education and growing alarm about the deepening political attack on universities in the global north and global south.

In addition to her prolific book authorship, Darian-Smith’s research has been featured in prestigious journals including the Law & Society Review, Third World Quarterly, Australian Journal of Human Rights, the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, New Global Studies, and Journal of Global History. She’s been supported by five grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Philosophical Society, and the UC Center for New Racial Studies.

Darian-Smith received her bachelor’s and law degrees at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She spent three years working as a corporate lawyer before earning her master’s in anthropology at Harvard and her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Before joining UCI, she served for 22 years on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara where she chaired the Department of Global Studies and the Law & Society Program.

Darian-Smith will be among ISA's 2024-25 award winners who will be recognized at the association's 66th annual convention to be held March 2-5th in Chicago.