Teaching Faculty

Tracey Holland (MA 1996, Teachers College, Columbia University; PhD 2007, New York University) has served as an adjunct faculty member with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights since 2015. She teaches courses on children’s rights and war, youth and gun violence in the US, and the senior honors thesis seminar. As a published author and researcher, she specializes in issues related to youth displaced by international conflict and human rights education as a strategy for post-conflict reparation and reconciliation. Her current research focuses on the arms industry and children’s rights in armed conflict.

Click here to learn more about Professor Holland.

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. With a background in the humanities and social sciences, he studies the circulation of discourses, concepts, and practices among human rights, development, and philanthropic organizations. His current book project, "In Search of the Political: How Social Movements Enter Liberal Social Change Projects," locates a search for a more ambitious and political kind of liberal social change by elite civil society professionals in the first two decades of the 21st century, and interrogates the epistemological assumptions, elite self-fashioning, metaphorical structures, and social scientific concepts that underwrite their turn to grassroots social movements. He is currently a host of the New Books Network podcast's Human Rights Channel. 
 
Tim has worked at ISHR as program coordinator for the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability and the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Program, as a research fellow for CARE's Social Movements Advisor, disability rights law intern for Human Rights Watch, and as an editor of the Historical Dialogues Working Paper Series and editorial assistant for Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory. In 2022-2023 he was a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. Tim's areas of teaching and research encompass the histories of human rights, philanthropy, and development; law and the humanities and socio-legal studies; social movements; postcolonial and settler colonial studies; narrative analysis and genre theory; the rhetoric of the social sciences; and contemporary political theory. 
 
Courses at ISHR:

• Refugees, Rights, and Representation
• Indigenous Rights and Settler Colonialism in North America
• Beyond Human Rights Critique?
• Human Rights and Populism
• Human Rights Research Seminar

 
Education:

• BAH in English Literature and History (Queen's University, Canada)
• MSt. in English Language and Literature (Oxford University, UK)
• MA in Human Rights (Columbia University, USA)
• PhD Rhetoric (UC Berkeley, USA)

Ted Perlmutter is a technology consultant and information systems architect. He is responsible for website coordination and database development, and has been involved in creation of the Religious Peacemaking Database project. Perlmutter’s research interests focus on how Internet technology can promote knowledge networks among political and social activists. Presently a visiting fellow at the Center for European Studies at New York University, he is developing a course on internet technology and international conflict resolution.

Perlmutter’s research in this area includes work with Suzette Brooks Masters on a Ford Foundation sponsored project entitled "Networking the Networks: Improving Information Flow in the Immigration Field." He has published numerous articles and book chapters on immigration, refugees, political parties, and civil society. Perlmutter taught in the New York University political science department as a lecturer and an assistant professor (1987-1992). He has been the recipient of a German Marshall Fund Grant for the Study of Germany and the Fulbright Commission Fellowship for Study in Italy for research on xenophobic politics in Europe from 1993 to 1995. He was a visiting fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Italian Studies on America at Columbia University (1997-98). Perlmutter holds a B.A. in political science from Wesleyan University, and an M.A. and Ph. D. in sociology from Harvard University.

Click here to learn more about Professor Perlmutter.

Shourideh C. Molavi is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. 
 
Shourideh is a writer and scholar specializing in critical state theory, decolonization, migration and border studies, decolonial ecologies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 20 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East—focusing on Israel/Palestine—on the topics of border practices, citizenship and statelessness, militarized landscapes, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence, and power.
 
Shourideh studied Political Science at the University of Toronto (B.A. 2008) and completed her graduate studies at York University in Canada (M.A. 2010; Ph.D. 2018). She has taught on the above topics in liberal arts schools across the Middle East and North Africa, including at Bard College in Al-Quds University in Jerusalem (2013-2015), at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar (2016-2018), at the American University in Cairo, Egypt (2018-2020), and most recently at the University of Basel (2020-2023).
 
Since 2014, she has worked as the dedicated researcher on Palestine/Israel and fieldworker for Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The spatial analyses and human rights-oriented investigations on Palestine that Shourideh oversees at Forensic Architecture examine how mapping and visualization of physical environments undergoing political violence may enhance the data and scholarship produced—and complement liberation and anti-oppression struggles.
 
Her publications include Stateless Citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013); Contemporary Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2018); Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance (Pluto Press, 2024); Constituting the Jewish State: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Inclusion Restrictions (I.B. Tauris, 2026 forthcoming), and Human Rights Against Palestine: Counter-Forensics and the Treachery of Images (Verso Books, 2026 forthcoming). Shourideh’s past and ongoing investigations with Forensic Architecture can be found here.

Rainer Braun teaches the course "Human Rights and Development Policy" at SIPA. His research interests are the political economy of human rights, labor rights, and corporate social accountability.

Rainer works as a research analyst for Governance Metrics International (GMI), a ratings agency that compares the governance practices of publicly traded companies. He also serves as an adjunct professor at LIU's United Nations graduate program, where he teaches research methods and statistics. In the past, his human rights related work included positions with the National Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras and the UN office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Rainer holds a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of Bremen and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the Free University of Berlin.

Click here to learn more about Professor Braun.

Noah Chasin is Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture in the Urban Design program at Columbia GSAPP. He received his Ph.D. in Architectural and Urban History from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a historian/critic/theorist with a specific emphasis on the relationship between urban design/planning and human rights. His teaching, research, and writing center on issues of human rights in zones of urban conflict, questioning the ways in which citizenship and access are adjudicated in urban social networks.

Chasin has taught at Bard College, Cornell, Barnard, RISD, and the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School. His critical writing has appeared in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, ArtForum, and Journal of Architectural Education, among many others. He was formerly architecture critic for Time Out New York, and was featured in the urban design documentary Urbanized, directed by Gary Hustwit.

In addition to his role in the M.S. AUD faculty, he is affiliated faculty at Columbia´s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. He is also Executive Editor for publications at The Drawing Center, NYC.

Click here to learn more about Professor Chasin.

Dr. Mila Rosenthal is an advocate and campaigner whose professional work and academic interest spans international human rights, human development, and climate justice. She is the Managing Director and co-founder of Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit creative incubator using applied research for real-world action, channeling cultural energy into civic power. Previously, Dr Rosenthal played a lead role in the global public campaign to launch and popularize the Sustainable Development Goals as head of Communications and Advocacy at the United Nations Development Programme. 

In other roles, Dr Rosenthal served as the Executive Director of the International Science Reserve at the New York Academy of Sciences, connecting scientists with communities to respond to global climate and health disasters. As Deputy Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, she led research and advocacy on international and domestic human rights abuses. Dr Rosenthal was also a founding Board member of the Business & Human Rights Centre, tracking the human rights abuses and advances of companies around the world. 

Dr. Rosenthal had the privilege to work in several countries in Africa, and before that in Southeast Asia, including as part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Cambodia. In Vietnam, the women factory workers who generously shared their lives and work with Dr Rosenthal for two years gave her the research basis for her PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics; and cemented her commitment to working with and on behalf of people and communities to claim their human rights.

Courses taught:

• Advocacy for Socio-Economic Rights
• Mobilization for Policy Change

Michael Garcia Bochenek is senior counsel to the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, focusing on juvenile justice and refugee and migrant children. He has researched and reported on criminal and juvenile justice systems and prison conditions, the protection of refugees and internally displaced persons, the exploitation of migrant workers and other labor rights issues, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, and rights violations in armed conflict, including the use of children as soldiers. From 2006 to 2015, he was director of policy and then director of law and policy for Amnesty International’s secretariat in London, where he oversaw strategic litigation, among other responsibilities. Earlier, he worked as counsel, senior researcher, and then deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Children’s Rights Division in New York, directed a non-profit immigration legal services office in Washington State’s Yakima Valley, and was the Leonard Sandler Fellow with Human Rights Watch’s Americas Division in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Michigan State University and Columbia Law School. In addition to English, he speaks Spanish and Portuguese.

Louis Bickford has been working in the field of international human rights for over 20 years. From 2012-2017, Bickford managed the global human rights program at the Ford Foundation. Prior to that, at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), he was a founding staff member (2001) and a member of the Senior Management team (through 2010). He later worked at RFK Human Rights as the COO and as the director of the European Office. He has consulted with various national and international institutions including the United Nations and philanthropic foundations in every world region. He has a PhD from McGill University and an MA from the New School, both in Political Science. Since 2017, he has founded two social enterprises and launched the Alternative Resourcing for Change and Solidarity (ARCS) Roundtable to bring together NGO leaders and philanthropic partners around innovative resourcing models for human rights organizations.

Kristina Eberbach is a human rights consultant and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She served as Deputy Director at the Institute for the Study of Human rights from 2019-2021 and as Director of Education from 2010-2019. She has developed and facilitated human rights courses and workshops for university students, members of civil society and government officials in Colombia, Iraq, Myanmar, and the U.S. and has undertaken research, reporting, and advocacy work in Kenya (International Crisis Group), Myanmar, The Netherlands (ICTY/ICTR), South Africa, Uganda (Charity for Peace Foundation), and the U.S. She is on the steering committee of Human Rights Educators USA and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the University and College Consortium for Human Rights Education. Her research interests focus on human rights education and human rights in conflict and transitional contexts. Kristina holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. She is currently a doctoral student at Utrecht University’s Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance. 

Julie Rajan is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University; an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of the Masters Program in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-NB; and a member of the Affiliate Faculty in The Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University-NB. Her research interests include: women’s human rights; gender-based violence in conflict; and colonial, post-colonial, and modern-day imperialisms. Her monographs include: Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (2011);  Al Qaeda’s Global Crisis: The Islamic State, Takfir, and the Genocide of Muslims (2015); and Women, Violence, and the Islamic State: Resurrecting the Caliphate through Gendercide (forthcoming 2024).

She has co-edited and edited a number of collections and special issues, including Violence and Gender in the Globalized World (2008); Human Rights in Postcolonial India (2016); and The United States, Security, and Human Rights: Extra-Ordinary ‘Justice’ in the Post-9/11 Era, Special Issue for The Security Journal (March 2015).

Research Interests: 

gender and human rights; gender-based violence in conflict; and colonial, post-colonial, and modern-day imperialisms 

Joy L. Chia is the Executive Director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a public foundation rooted in LGBTQI communities and movements working globally to advance the rights of LGBTQI people and communities. Astraea endeavors to mobilize and distribute resources so as to reach the activists and communities who need them most and who are best positioned to make transformational impact over time.

Joy comes to Astraea from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), where she was the Team Manager with the Women’s Rights Program and led its work on “Power of the Collective” which supports feminist activism, community mobilization and advocacy to be more independent, resilient, vibrant, and inclusive. From 2012-2018, Joy was the OSF East Asia program officer and led the program’s grant-making portfolios on equality and human rights in East Asia (including disability rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and women’s rights).

She has also held fellowships and taught international human rights law and practice at institutions in the United States and in Hong Kong, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong and at Fordham Law School, where she was the 2010-2012 Asia Law and Justice Fellow at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice. Joy is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. Joy’s publications include the co-edited volume Gender, Violence and the State in Asia (July 2016, Routledge) and scholarly articles on human rights in Asia.

Joseph Slaughter is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a member of The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, Slaughter specializes in postcolonial literatures (particularly from Latin America and Africa), international law, and socio-cultural histories of the Global South. His research and teaching focus on the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.
 
Professor Slaughter’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, the Abigail R. Cohen Fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination (Paris), and a Public Voices Fellowship. His first book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman genre of the novel, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. He served seven years in the leadership of the American Comparative Literature Association, including his election as President in 2016.
 
Slaughter has published many influential articles on literatures of the Global South, human rights, intellectual property, international law, and decolonization in a wide range of journals, including: “A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law” and “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World” in Human Rights Quarterly; “Pathetic Fallacies: Personification and the Unruly Subjects of International Law,” in London Review of International Law; “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There,” in The Journal of Human Rights; “Humanitarian Reading,” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative; “Life, Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say,” in Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development; “The Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?” in Critical Quarterly; “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” in PMLA; “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Form; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” in Comparative Literature Studies; “Who Owns the Means of Expression?” in The b2o Review; “World Literature as Property,” in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics; “After Freedom: Literature, Human Rights Law, and the Return of Decolonization,” in Decolonizing the English Curriculum.
 
Slaughter was a founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. He co-edited a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a cohesive region, outlined in “The Sea of International Politics: Fluidity, Solvency, and Drift in The Global South Atlantic.” He is currently completing two monographs: “New Word Orders: Intellectual Property, Piracy, and the Globalization of the Novel,” which considers the role of plagiarism and piracy in the creation of contemporary world literature and international IP regimes, as well the work that the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual resources; and “Behind Human Rights,” which examines the rise of human rights and development discourse in the period of political decolonization from the 1960s-80s from the perspective of Third World aspirations and approaches, considering especially the peculiar roles that colonial charter companies and transnational corporations played in the creation of international human rights law.

Jo Becker is the advocacy director for Human Rights Watch's children's rights division, where she is responsible for the organization's global advocacy strategies on issues including child labor, children and armed conflict, juvenile justice, and violence against children.

She is the founding chairperson of the international Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, which campaigned successfully for an international treaty banning the forced recruitment of children under age eighteen or their use in armed conflict. She has conducted field investigations to document human rights abuses in Burma, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Liberia, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States; and is the author of multiple Human Rights Watch reports on violence against children, barriers to education, the use of child soldiers, and the detention of unaccompanied children by the U.S. immigration service.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1997, Becker was the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the United States' oldest national peace organization. 

She holds an international baccalaureate from the Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific, a bachelor's in psychology from Goshen College (IN), and a master's degree in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Jackie Dugard is a Senior Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) and the Department of Political Science, Columbia University. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa (where she taught property law, and human rights law between 2014 and 2022). At Columbia, Jackie teaches International Human Rights Law, Socio-Economic Rights, and Climate Justice as part of the Human Rights Studies MA program. 

With a background in law and social sciences – BA (Hons) & LLB (Wits); MPhil & PhD (Cambridge); LLM (Essex) – Jackie focuses on the role of law in social change (internationally, and in South Africa). She has published widely on socio-economic rights (especially the rights to housing, land, and water), and legal mobilization. Jackie is the lead co-author of Edward Elgar’s Research Handbook on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights (Jackie Dugard, Bruce Porter, Daniela Ikawa, and Lilian Chenwi, 2020). Her most recent publication is: Jackie Dugard (2025) ‘Testing the transformative premise of the South African Land Claims Court: A comparison of Land Claims Court, Supreme Court of Appeal and Constitutional Court land rights’ decisions, 1996-2024’, 15 Constitutional Court Review 429-454.

Jackie is the workstream leader on Land and Housing Rights for a UN Prevention project that aims to identify and consolidate upstream ways to prevent land and housing rights violations globally. She is also part of a 6-year Research Council of Norway-funded project, ‘Pluriland’, which is examining the impact on human security of enacting plural land rights across six countries. Arising from Pluriland, Jackie and Rachel Sieder from CIESAS (Mexico City) are co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Law in Context on the enactment of plural land rights in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Mexico, and South Africa. 

Jackie was the co-founder and first executive director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and the founding director of the Gender Equity Office (GEO) at Wits. She is a Global Fellow at the Centre on Law & Social Transformation (University of Bergen, Norway), and an Associate Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway). Jackie is an editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights (SAJHR). 

Glenn Mitoma is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University.  His research and teaching focus on the history of human rights and human rights education, with current projects on the role of education in advancing respect for human rights, and the history of human rights education.

Previously, Glenn served as Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Education and Director of Dodd Human Rights Impact at the University of Connecticut, where he created and oversaw efforts to advance a culture of human rights through programs in human rights education, business and human rights, and democracy and dialogues, and sustains partnerships with community-based advocates and organizations.  From 2022-2023, Glenn was Managing Director of the Institute for Social Transformation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he managed a range of projects and initiatives that provided pathways to community-engaged scholarship.
 
Among his publications are articles in The International Journal of Human Rights Education, Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of International Social Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and History.  He has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Human Rights, one focused on Human Rights in Higher Education and one focused on Humanitarianism and Responsibility. His first book Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power was published in 2013 as part of the University of Pennsylvania Press series Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights.  
 
He has served on the Connecticut State Advisory Committee on Genocide and Holocaust Education and the Executive Committee for Human Rights Educators USA, and was a founding member of both the Connecticut Human Rights Partnership and the University and College Consortium for Human Rights Education.

Felisa Tibbitts is Chair in Human Rights Education in the Department of Law, Economics and Governance at Utrecht University and UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Higher Education. Her research interests include human rights, (global) democratic citizenship education and education for sustainable development; curriculum policy and reform; critical pedagogy; education and social movements; and human rights and higher education transformation. She was a Fulbright Fellow at Lund University, Sweden (Fall 2014) and a Human Rights Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2011-2013). She was a full-time Lecturer at Teachers College of Columbia University between 2016 and 2022 and has served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University since 2022.

Felisa has published practical resources on curriculum, program development and evaluation on behalf of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, UNESCO, OSCE/ODIHR, the Council of Europe and non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International and the Open Society Foundations. Dr. Tibbitts is widely read in the field of human rights education and her scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals including Comparative Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Social Science Education, Intercultural Education, Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education and the International Review of Education.

Previously she was an adjunct faculty member at the Harvard School of Education and the UN-Mandated University for Peace and she remains affiliated with the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. She co-founded the NGO Human Rights Education Associates (HREA – www.hrea.org) in 1996, which she continues to direct. Felisa received her bachelor degree and two masters (Public Policy, Education) from Harvard University and her D.Phil in Political Science from the Otto-von-Guericke Universität of Magdeburg.

Daniela Ikawa teaches Introduction to Human Rights and Equality, Identity and Rights in the Human Rights Studies M.A. Program. She is currently a Senior legal Advisor at FILE Foundation.  She was formerly a Senior Strategic Litigation Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative.

A Brazilian lawyer, she obtained her LLM from Columbia University Law School and her doctorate from the University of São Paulo (USP). At Columbia, she was nominated Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar for her academic accomplishments in May 1999. Her doctoral thesis at USP was approved with distinction in 2006, published in 2008 by Lumen Iuris, and cited by the Brazilian Supreme Court in its 2012 decision that declared the constitutionality of affirmative action programs in Brazil.

Ikawa worked at Conectas Human Rights (Sao Paulo), PILnet (New York), and  and the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (New York), and taught at the Central European University (Budapest) and PUC (Sao Paulo). She was the managing co-editor of Sur-International Journal on Human Rights and has published approximately forty books and articles on human rights in the United States and Brazil. Her current research focuses on the connection between particularly situated individuals and a contextualized theory of rights.

Recent Publications

Contextualized Rights as Effective Rights to All: The Case of Affirmative Action in Brazil, Vol 12: Who Wants To Share? Attitudes Towards Horizontal Redistribution Across the Globe (2024).

Hungary’s Anti-NGO Tax Law Violates Free Speech and Freedom of Association, Open Society Justice Initiative (2018).

Rights for real people, networks and a view from everywhere, Transnational Advocacy Networks: Reflecting on 15 years of Evolving Theory and Practice (2018).

Building Pluralism through Affirmative Action. The case of Brazil. Canada: Global Centre for Pluralism (2017).

Asking whose lives matter in the battle for social, cultural, and economic rights, Open Democracy (19 November 2016).

Bruce Cronin is Professor of Political Science and and Department Chair at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York. Professor Cronin received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cronin's specialties are in the fields of international law, international organizations, and human rights. He is currently writing a book on civilian casualties in armed conflict under International Humanitarian Law.

Click here to learn more about Professor Cronin.

Recent Publications

Purging the Odious Scourge of Atrocities: The Limits of Consent in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Bruce Cronin, Bugsplat: The Politics of Collateral Damage in Western Armed Conflicts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).

Belinda Cooper is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights and New York University's Center for Global Affairs. Cooper teaches and lectures on human rights and international law, with a particular focus on transitional justice, war crimes tribunals, and women’s rights. She led an NYU study trip to The Hague, Bosnia and Serbia for several years and participated in a similar trip to Rwanda. She is the editor of War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, which explored the interconnections between the Nuremberg tribunal and today's international criminal tribunals.

Cooper’s experience has included working with East German dissidents before the fall of communism, assisting the lawyers for a German Guantanamo detainee, organizing a project on memorialization of the past in Turkey, and coauthoring reports on domestic violence in Tanzania, Armenia and Uzbekistan. She has written for a wide variety of print and online publications and participated in numerous panels and discussions in the US and abroad. She lived in Berlin, Germany, for many years and is a translator of German scholarly books and articles, including many texts on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and textbooks on international criminal law and transitional justice.
 
Cooper holds a law degree from Yale Law School and has taught human rights, international law, transitional justice and women and the law at The New School, Brooklyn College, Ohio Northern University Law School, Seton Hall Law School and Humboldt University in Berlin.
 
She is co-founder and president of Brooklyn Animal Action, an animal rescue non-profit.

Professor Nathan is chair of the steering committee of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science, 2003–2006, chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2002–2003, and director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 1991–1995. Off campus, he is a member of the boards of Human Rights in China, and the National Endowment for Democracy, and a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, which he chaired, 1995–2000. He is a member of the steering committee of the Asian Barometer Surveys; the regular Asia and Pacific book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine; and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary China, China Information, and others. He does frequent interviews for the print and electronic media, has advised on several film documentaries on China, and has consulted for business and government.

Professor Nathan’s books include Peking Politics, 1918–1923 (University of California Press, 1976); Chinese Democracy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, coedited with David Johnson and Evelyn S. Rawski (University of California Press, 1985); Human Rights in Contemporary China, with R. Randle Edwards and Louis Henkin (Columbia University Press, 1986); China’s Crisis (Columbia University Press, 1990); The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security, with Robert S. Ross (W. W. Norton, 1997); China’s Transition (Columbia University Press, 1997); The Tiananmen Papers, coedited with Perry Link (Public Affairs, 2001); Negotiating Culture and Human Rights: Beyond Universalism and Relativism, coedited with Lynda S. Bell and Ilan Peleg (Columbia University Press, 2001); China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files, coauthored with Bruce Gilley (New York Review Books, 2002, 2nd ed., 2003); Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization, coedited with Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, and Kavita Philip(M.E. Sharpe, 2003); How East Asians View Democracy, coedited with Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, and Doh Chull Shin (Columbia University Press, 2008); and China’s Search for Security, coauthored with Andrew Scobell (Columbia University Press, 2012). His next project is a coedited and coauthored volume called Ambivalent Democrats, which analyzes data from the Asian Barometer Surveys.

Professor Nathan’s articles have appeared in World Politics, Daedalus, The China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Asian Survey, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. His research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and others. He has directed five National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars.

Professor Nathan received his degrees from Harvard University: the BA in history, summa cum laude, in 1963; the MA in East Asian Regional Studies, in 1965; and the PhD in Political Science in 1971. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1970 to 1971 and has been at Columbia University since 1971.

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

• Nathan, Andrew J., and Andrew Scobell. China’s Search for Security. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
• Nathan, Andrew J., Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, and Doh Chull Shin, eds. How East Asians View Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Nathan, Andrew J., and Bruce Gilley. China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files. New York: New York Review of Books Press, 2003.
• Nathan, Andrew J., Lynda S. Bell, and Ilan Peleg, eds. Negotiating Culture and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
• Nathan, Andrew J. China’s Transition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
• Nathan, Andrew J. China’s Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
• Nathan, Andrew J. Chinese Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
• Nathan, Andrew J. Peking Politics 1918-1923: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.