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Laura Anne Thompson a Visting Scholar at the CSDD for the 2025/26 academic year. She is a cultural anthropologist specializing in religion in North Africa and the broader Mediterranean. She is interested in the study of blasphemy and hate speech, as well as comedy and curses, and in how arguments about emotion can support claim-making. Laura was previously a Raphael Morrison Dorman postdoctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Center at Harvard University.  She has also taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and at Miami University of Ohio. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2022.

Laura is currently completing a book project, Who Speaks for the Sacred, which examines high-stakes Tunisian blasphemy cases starting in the mid-19th century and finishing in the present day.  She is also continuing a new project, Wounding Words, which examines both blasphemy and hate speech cases across the western Mediterranean region, specifically in France, Tunisia, Morocco, and Spain. Bringing together postcolonies with their former colonizers, Wounding Words proposes that citizens across the region call on states to care for their emotional well-being by prosecuting hurtful words.