Until he retired in 2024, John Comaroff was Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University. Until 2012, he was the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. 
Educated at the University of Cape Town (B.A., 1966) and the London School of Economics (Ph.D. 1973), his recent research in South Africa is on crime, policing, personhood, and the workings of the state; democracy and difference; and precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial political economy and law. He has also written on ethnicity and identity, African economy, society, religion, and culture.
His authored and edited books include, with Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (2 vols), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Modernity and its Malcontents, Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Ethnicity, Inc., Zombiês et frontiêres à ère neoliberale, Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, The Truth about Crime, and The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa.