Alexander Alvarez

Northern Arizona University

Dr. Alex Alvarez is a Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. From 2001 until 2003 he was the founding Director of the Martin-Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust, Tolerance, and Humanitarian Values. In 2017-2018, he served as the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University. His main areas of study are in the areas of collective and interpersonal violence. His books include Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, Murder American Style, Violence: The Enduring Problem, Genocidal Crimes, Native America and the Question of Genocide, and Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide. He has also served as an editor for the journal Violence and Victims, was a founding co-editor of Genocide Studies and Prevention, and is an editor for Genocide Studies International. He has been invited to speak and present his research across the U.S. and Europe. 

Joyce Apsel

Course Director, New York University

Joyce Apsel Ph.D., J.D., is Clinical Professor of Humanities in Liberal Studies, College of Arts & Sciences at New York University, and President of the Institute for Study of Genocide.

Based on her research interests in comparative genocide and human rights, she teaches seminars in the Politics, Rights and Development Concentration. Course subjects include Human Rights, Cultures of Peace and Terror, Global Violence, Societies at Risk, Politics of Mass Hate and Genocide, and Re-thinking, Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Global Citizenship. Together, in small classes, her students read about and debate the history and politics of just and unjust wars, the role of non-governmental organizations and the complex challenges of addressing targeted violence past and present---in the Ukraine to Chechnya to Darfur as well as structural violence in the US and elsewhere. Students have the opportunity to research their own interests; recent projects and senior theses include Child Soldiers, HIV/AIDs and the Globalization of Drugs, Photography and Atrocity, Female Slave Trafficking in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe to aspects of the Indigenous Peoples and Slavery and the Global Migrant Crisis. Her goal is to explore diverse perspectives and critical analyses that facilitate each student finding his/her own voice and becoming informed, engaged, members of civil society and the global community. She is a recipient of the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award and of the student-nominated NYU Martin Luther King, Jr. Teaching Award (2022).

Joyce Apsel is the author of Introducing Peace Museums (2016), nominated for the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in non-fiction. She is also the co-author with Amy Sodaro of Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory, and Human Rights (2019) and co-editor with Ernesto Verdeja of Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives (2013). 

Doris Bergen

University of Toronto

Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. Her books include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (1996); War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003); The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Centuries (edited, 2004); and Lessons and Legacies VIII (edited, 2008).

Prof. Bergen has held grants and fellowships from the SSHRC, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the DAAD, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and she has taught at the Universities of Warsaw, Pristina, Tuzla, Notre Dame, and Vermont. Her current projects include a book on German military chaplains in the Nazi era and a study of definitions of Germanness as revealed in the Volksdeutschen/ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. Bergen is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington , D.C.

Jennifer M. Dixon

Villanova University

Jennifer M. Dixon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. Her research focuses on the development of international norms, the politics of memory, genocide and mass atrocity, transitional justice, and international human rights. She is the author of Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies. She is currently working on a co-authored book (with Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch) that traces the trajectory of the international human rights regime from 1945 to the present. Tentatively titled On the Rights Trajectory: International Norm Development and the Post-World War II Human Rights Regime, the book introduces a conceptual model of norm development, which is used to analyze changes over time in the content and strength of five core human rights norms: the prescriptive norms of legal accountability, truth-seeking, and reparations; and the prohibitive norms against genocide and torture. The book's innovative conceptual framework and rigorous multi-method evaluation of the origin, trajectory, and status of each of these norms answer persistent international relations theory questions, such as, when does a principled idea become a norm? and how do international norms change and develop over time and space? Combined, the study of these five norms offers an assessment of the development and status of the international human rights regime as a whole.

Dr. Dixon has published articles in the European Journal of International Relations, the Journal of Genocide Research, Perspectives on Politics, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, South European Society and Politics, and the International Journal for Education Law and Policy.

Her work has been recognized with the Outstanding Article Award from the International History and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Mary Parker Follett Prize for the best article on Politics and History by APSA’s Politics and History section, and an Honorable Mention for the Walter Dean Burnham Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in Politics and History by APSA’s Politics and History section.

Dr. Dixon holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in Government from Dartmouth College. She was previously a predoctoral and postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. 

At Villanova, she teaches undergraduate and master ’s-level courses on international security, genocide and mass killing, the politics of memory, and research design.

Maureen Hiebert

University of Calgary

Maureen S. Hiebert (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Research Fellow at the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. She teaches courses in law and politics, international law, the law of armed conflict, and genocide studies. Her publications include the book Constructing Genocide and Mass Violence: Society, Crises, Identity and several articles and book chapters on topics including identity construction and elite decision-making, impediments to genocide prevention, Mass Atrocity Response military operations, the limitations of international criminal trials, and the nature of violence in modernity. Her work has appeared in Genocide Studies International, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Politics and Governance, European Legacy and several edited volumes. Her current research explores the challenges posed to the law of armed conflict and democratic civil-military relations by military AI and lethal autonomous weapon systems, the role of law in the perpetration of genocide, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded collaborative project on the nexus between modernity and political violence called The Oddities of Violence. She was the 2019-2020 recipient of the Faculty of Graduate Studies Great Supervisor Award for the Department of Political Science. 

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Prof. Hiebert is the Chair of the Zoryan Institute’s Academic Board of Directors. 

Amy E. Randall

Santa Clara University

Amy E. Randall is Chair of the History Department, Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director for the Center for Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University in California. She is a historian of the Soviet Union and a gender studies and genocide studies scholar. Randall teaches courses on genocide and gender, the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, gender and national identity in twentieth-century Eastern and Western Europe, and the history of sexuality. She is the author and editor of numerous articles, chapters, and books, including the expanded and updated 2nd edition of the edited collection,Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey (2022), which contains a new introduction by Randall as well as her chapter, “Imperialism, Modern Race Thinking, Gender, and Genocide.”Randall received her MA and PhD in History from Princeton University and her BA from Wesleyan University

Elisabeth King

New York University

Elisabeth King is Professor of International Education and Politics at New York University, Vice Dean for Faculty at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Founding Director of NYU’s minor in Peace and Conflict Studies. Her research focuses on war, peace, development, and education in ethnically diverse and conflict-affected contexts. She is author (with Cyrus Samii) of Diversity, Violence and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford University Press, 2020), winner of the International Studies Association’s 2022 Best Book Award, and From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda (Cambridge University Press, 2014), named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Libraries Association. Other recent work appears in Journal of Peace Research, World Development and African Studies Review. King’s work has been funded by grants from such organizations as the United States Institute of Peace, the Spencer Foundation, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy. She has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Liberia, the Philippines and Rwanda, among others, using diverse research methods ranging from in-depth qualitative interviews and focus groups, to randomized field experiments and surveys. She has consulted for organizations including Innovations for Poverty Action, UNICEF, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the MasterCard Foundation. She works with policy-makers to link her scholarship with on-the-ground practice and programming. King received her PhD in political science from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

Athena Madan

University of Victoria

Dr. Athena Madan (University of Toronto, 2014) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria. She looks at social medicine and as applied to humanitarian intervention. Expertise includes: global health; capacity building; therapeutic governance and intergenerational trauma; reconciliation; genocide and human rights; social innovation and theories of change; rehabilitation of child soldiers; the militarisation of aid; socio-political contexts of addictions; refugee mental health; and, health and war. 

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Madan has experience in more than 20 countries and five continents. Specific countries of expertise include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Vietnam. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders, the Carter Center, the UNHCR, the WHO, grassroots NGOs, and provided anti-racist subject matter expertise to provincial governments in Canada. Madan has also served as an election observer for the DRC, and taught in England, France, and the United States.

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On a more personal note, Madan is half Filipino and half Indian; fluently bilingual in French and in English; the mother of Deven Francisco (born March 2019) and Sofia Isabela (born October 2023); the other half of Drew (a partner with Woodward & Company LLP); and the seventh of seven siblings (auspicious for a Filipino).

Kerri J. Malloy

San Jose State University

Kerri J. Malloy (Yurok/Karuk) is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at San Jose State University. His research focuses on the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the ongoing healing and reconciliation in North America. He has over fifteen years of experience working with federally recognized tribes and tribal organizations. He chairs the Indigenous Caucus and serves on the Advisory Board of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He holds a Master of Jurisprudence in Indian Law from The University of Tulsa and a doctoral degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College.

Suren Manukyan

Yerevan State University

Suren Manukyan is the Head of the Vahakn Dadrian Department of Comparative Genocide Studies with the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI) and holds the UNESCO Chair on Prevention of Genocide and Other Atrocity Crimes at Yerevan State University (YSU). He also teaches Armenian History and Genocide-related courses at the American University of Armenia (AUA). 

He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University of New Jersey (2012-2013) and Kazan Visiting Fellow at California State University, Fresno (2021-22).

He has extensive experience with the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), including as a member of the IAGS Resolutions committee (2015-2017) and an elected member of the Advisory Board (2017-2019 and 2019-2021). 

His research deals with genocidal violence and perpetrators, focusing mainly on micro-level dynamics and the historiography of genocide. He is interested in strengthening the ties of SAS with Armenian academic institutions in Armenia.

His last publication is Suren Manukyan, The historiography of the Armenian genocide, Handbook of Genocide Studies (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023) 54-71

William A. Schabas

Middlesex University

Professor William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London. He is also professor of international humanitarian law and human rights at Leiden University, emeritus professor of human rights law at the National University of Ireland Galway and honorary chairman of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, invited visiting scholar at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Politiques), honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, visiting fellow of Kellogg College of the University of Oxford, and professeur associé at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Prof. Schabas is a ‘door tenant’ at the chambers of 9 Bedford Row, in London.  Professor Schabas holds BA and MA degrees in history from the University of Toronto and LLB, LLM and LLD degrees from the University of Montreal, as well as honorary doctorates in law from several universities.

He is the author of more than twenty books dealing in whole or in part with international human rights law, including: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights : travaux préparatoires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Unimaginable Atrocities, Justice, Politics and Rights at the War Crimes Tribunals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), The International Criminal Court: A Commentary on the Rome Statute (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Introduction to the International Criminal Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 4th ed.), Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2009) and The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 3rd ed.). He has also published more than 300 articles in academic journals, principally in the field of international human rights law and international criminal law. His writings have been translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Nepali and Albanian. 

Professor Schabas is editor-in-chief of Criminal Law Forum , the quarterly journal of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law. He is President of the Irish Branch of the International Law Association and chair of the International Institute for Criminal Investigation. From 2002 to 2004 he served as one of three international members of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Professor Schabas has worked as a consultant on capital punishment for the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, and drafted the 2010 report of the Secretary-General on the status of the death penalty (UN Doc. E/2010/10).  Professor Schabas was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007. He has been awarded the Vespasian V. Pella Medal for International Criminal Justice of the Association internationale de droit pénal, and the Gold Medal in the Social Sciences of the Royal Irish Academy.

James A. Tyner

Kent State University

James A. Tyner is a professor of geography at Kent State University and a fellow of the American Association of Geographers. He is the author of twenty-five books, including his most recent contribution, The Apathy of Empire: Cambodia in American Geopolitics. His honors include the AAG Glenda Laws Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues.  Professor Tyner’s areas of interest include genocide, geopolitics, and the political economy of mass violence.

James E. Waller

University of Connecticut

Dr. James Waller is the inaugural Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice at the University of Connecticut.  At UConn, he also directs the Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs for the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute and is a Professor of Literatures, Cultures, Languages, and Human Rights.  In addition, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast.  He is the author of six books, most notably his award-winning Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2007), Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016), and A Troubled Sleep: Risk and Resilience in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2021).  In 2017, Waller was the inaugural recipient of the Engaged Scholarship Prize from the International Association of Genocide Scholars in recognition of his exemplary engagement in advancing genocide awareness and prevention.  Waller has written for The Washington Post, The Irish News, and The Conversation and is frequently interviewed by broadcast and print media, including PBS, CNN, CBC, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, National Geographic, Scientific American, and The New York Times.

Cheng Xu

University of Toronto

Cheng Xu is an alumnus of the Genocide and Human Rights University Program. He is an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Department of Government at Smith College. As a former Canadian Armed Forces infantry officer and paratrooper with the Third Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, he deployed on Roto 0 of Operation Reassurance in Central and Eastern Europe in 2014. His academic research examines the impacts of community-level social relations on insurgencies and civil war with a focus on Southeast Asia. Cheng has published on the topics of civil wars, rebellion, peacebuilding, ethnic conflict, and genocide. He is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar. He served as a research fellow and senior policy analyst with Global Affairs Canada, under the Department’s Strategic Policy branch where he provided research support for its Feminist Foreign Policy, Strategic Gaming, Future of Diplomacy, and Feminist International Assistance Policy efforts.