Hugh Raffles is an anthropologist and writer whose work explores relationships among people, animals, and things. He is Professor of Anthropology at The New School in New York. His writing has appeared in academic and popular venues, including Granta, Public Culture, Natural History, Orion, American Ethnologist, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Best American Essays.
Raffles grew up in London, England, and moved to New York in the early 1990s. He lives in New York City.
Raffles was the recipient of the 2003 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award for In Amazonia: A Natural History.
In 2009, Raffles was awarded a Whiting Award.[1] In 2010, Insectopedia was the winner of the 2011 Orion Book Award and received a Special Award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. In 2012, the book won the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science and was shortlisted for the De Groene Waterman Prijs, Antwerp. The book was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 2010. The Book of Unconformities was awarded the 2023 J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research.
In 2023, Raffles received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[2]
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Philip Hoare described Insectopedia as "impossible to categorize, wildly allusive and always stimulating."[3]