Niko Besnier is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Social Inquiry, where he was also Research Professor in 2017–19. He is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist. He has previously taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986–88), Yale University (1989–95), Victoria University of Wellington (1996–2002), UCLA (2002–05), and the University of Amsterdam (2005–22). He has held visiting appointments or fellowships at the University of Hawai’i, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, University of Auckland, Kagoshima University, Waseda University (twice), University of Melbourne, École normal supérieure Paris, Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, University of Manchester, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Charles University Prague, Universidad de la República Montevideo, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and National Taiwan University.

He was born in Algeria, and brought up in Spain and Britain. He obtaining a BA in Mathematics from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, an MA in linguistics from Stanford University in 1981, and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California in 1986. He has conducted extensive field research in the Pacific, principally on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, where he has spent a total of four years since 1979, as well as Tonga, where he began fieldwork in 1977, which continues to this day. He has also conducted field research in Japan and the United States.

He is currently member of the Advisory Board of Insaniyyat: Palestinian Anthropological Society (since 2017); member of the Review Panel of the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (since 2023); and scientitifc chair of the Review Panel on Media & Communication Studies, Political Science, Social Work, Social & Cultural Anthropology, and Sociology of Research Foundation Flanders (since 2023). He has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2008–12); the Advisory Board of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality (2008–17); the Scientific Steering Committee, Laboratoire d’excellence TransferS, École normale supérieure Paris (2011–18, chair 2017–18); the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (2012–14); the Task Force on the American Anthropological Association’s Engagement with Israel-Palestine (2015); the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2015–17); the Executive Board of the American Ethnological Society (2016–19); the Advisory Board of SAPIENS: Anthropology, Everything Human (2017–18); the Scientific Advisory Board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (2018–22); and the Task Force on Rethinking Annual Meetings, American Anthropological Association (2021–22).

From 2016 to 2019, he was editor-in-chief of American Ethnologist. He currently serves on the editorial boards of a dozen journals and book series in anthropology, gender & sexuality studies, Pacific Island studies, sport studies, and linguistics. He regularly conducts workshops about how to write publishable articles and successful grant proposals. He regularly takes part in ad hoc PhD committees, appointment selection committees, grant proposal evaluation panels, academic programme reviews, and other professional duties around the world.

In 2012–17, Niko Besnier directed a project titled “Globalization, Sports, and the Precarity of Masculinity,” funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. See the project website at www.global-sport.eu. He has previously received funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the Marsden Fund (New Zealand); the National Science Foundation (United States); the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.