Berkley Center

Richard Sosis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work has focused on the evolution of cooperation, utopian societies, and the behavioral ecology of religion, with particular interest in the relationship between ritual and intra-group cooperation. He has also pursued ethnohistorical research on 19th century communal societies and conducted economic experiments in the United States and Israel. Sosis is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, which aims to unite multidisciplinary perspectives on the evolutionary, cognitive, and neurological study of religion. He began his graduate career at the University of Michigan in the Department of Anthropology and the interdisciplinary Evolution and Human Behavior program; he completed his doctorate in anthropology at the University of New Mexico's Human Evolutionary Ecology Program and taught there for a year before moving to Connecticut.