Miia Halme-Tuomisaari is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. An anthropologist trained in critical international law, her work engages with the post-World War II human rights phenomenon and the international order, contributing to debates in the anthropology of international organizations, law, bureaucracy, documents and expertise. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the UN Human Rights Committee, within human rights expert networks, CSOs and the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is also a specialist in the history of human rights, having carried out archival research on lobbying efforts for the UDHR in the 1940s.

She has previously held research positions at the University of Helsinki, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, and has delivered visiting lectures and invited talks at numerous universities across Europe.

Throughout her career, she has been worked to increase the societal visibility of scholarship and to develop innovative new publication formats, including co-founding the online publication allegralaboratory.net. She is currently Vice-Chair of TUTKAS, the society of Finnish MPs and researchers affiliated with the Finnish Parliament.

She has published widely in leading international journals including Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, AJIL: Unbound, The London Review of International Law and The European Journal of International Law. Her books include Human Rights in Action: Learning Expert Knowledge (Brill 2010), Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (CUP 2015, co-ed with Pamela Slotte), and Movement in the Rights Direction: An Ethnography of the UN Human Rights Committee (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

In academic year 2023-2024 she was on sabbatical with funding from the Riksbankens Jubiliumsfonds to work on a book manuscript ‘Looping for Human Rights: an Ethnographic Theory of Expansion’ which she is currently finalizing.

She is Docent of International law at the University of Turku (2016), Docent of Social and Cultural Anthropology, specialization legal anthropology at the University of Jyväskylä (2018), and Docent of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki (2019).