Dr. Robin Conley Riner earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a focus on linguistic anthropology from UCLA in 2011 and her B.A. in anthropology and linguistics from NYU in 2002. She is Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Professor of Dance at Marshall University. Her work is largely dedicated to exploring language use in contexts of institutional violence, querying what language can reveal about people’s experiences of killing, violence, and death. Her book, Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases, explores how capital jurors use language to counter moments of empathy they share with defendants, thereby justifying their decisions for death. She has also co-authored and edited books on linguistic anthropology, language and law, and social justice including A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Just Words: Law, Language, and Power, and Language and Social Justice in Practice. She continually provides linguistics consultation and education to legal practitioners.
Dr. Riner is also engaged in multiple projects that seek to understand the experiences of military veterans and improve their post-service lives. The first was multiple projects funded by the WV Humanities Council that provided discussion groups centered around humanities texts about war to veterans throughout West Virginia. An additional project uses ethnography to explore yoga and other forms of collaborative, embodied interaction as resources for veterans struggling with moral injury. She has also received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce immersive theater performances with local veterans in collaboration with community artists and Marshall University students. Dr. Riner’s research and teaching have been recognized at Marshall through the Hedrick Program Grant for Teaching Innovation, a John Marshall Summer Scholar Award, and the Pickens Queen Teaching Award. As a dancer, she has performed professionally across the country and her choreography has been showcased at the West Virginia Dance Festival, the Southern Ohio Dance Festival, and the Huntington Music & Arts Festival. With support from the Drinko Fellowship, her upcoming work will bring together her anthropological and dance experience to investigate how our bodies exist and act in relationship with other bodies, spaces, and entities, and the ways in which these actions foster or restrict empathic and humanizing engagements with others.