Genocide & Human Rights University Program

The Zoryan Institute is proud to have invited some of the most internationally renowned scholars in their fields for this unique course on genocide and human rights.

Joyce A. Apsel         Brent Beardsley
Doris L. Bergen        Maureen Hiebert
Herbert Hirsch          William A. Schabas
Roger Smith             Samuel Totten
Simon Payaslian      Ernesto Verdeja

Joyce Apsel

Joyce Apsel, Ph.D., J.D. is an historian, attorney and Master Teacher in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, where she teaches courses in Great Books and on Genocide and Human Rights. She has taught courses on genocide from a multi-disciplinary, comparative perspective at a variety of institutions, including a graduate course at Drew University in New Jersey on The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Denial. She is founder and director of the non-profit Rights Works International, an international educational project, and conducts in-class workshops for students (middle school and up) and teachers on issues of genocide and human rights.

Dr. Apsel is currently President of the Institute for the Study of Genocide and a former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (2001-2003). For four years she was Director of Education for the Anne Frank Center USA and traveled nationally with their exhibits conducting workshops on tolerance education and the history of genocide and human rights.

Dr. Apsel is the co-editor of Peace Museums: Past, Present and Future (Kyoto, Japan, 2008) and editor of Darfur: Genocide before Our Eyes (3rd edition 2007); and Teaching about Human Rights (2005). She is co-editor with Helen Fein of Teaching about Genocide (3rd ed. published in 2002) and has written articles on a range of subjects including education, children's rights, and Darfur. Dr. Apsel is current NGO/DPI representative for the International Network of Museums for Peace at the United Nations as well as a jurist for the biennial Lemkin Award for the outstanding work on genocide. She was a recipient of the 2008-2009 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. Her 2010 article, "Darfur: Historic Processes and Regional Dynamics" received the Outstanding Article Award from the Peace, War and Conflict section of the American Sociological Association.

Brent Beardsley

Major Brent Beardsley, born in Ottawa and raised in Montreal, is a 30-year veteran of the Canadian Army. He graduated from a Pre-Arts program at Sir George Williams University (1974), completed a BA in History from Concordia University (1977), a post-graduate diploma in Education from McGill University (1978) and a Masters Degree in Applied Science in Management (1999) from the Royal Military College of Canada.

Major Beardsley joined the Canadian Forces as an Infantry Officer in 1978. He has served four tours of regimental duty with operational tours in Norway, Germany and Cyprus. On extra-regimental duty he has been employed as an instructor on the Basic Officer Training Course, as a doctrine author responsible for the first draft of the first Canadian Forces Peacekeeping Manual and as the Chief Instructor of the Canadian Forces Peacekeeping Training Center. He is currently a research officer at the Canadian Forces Leadership Institute.

In 1993 and 1994, before and during the genocide in Rwanda, Major Beardsley served as the Personal Staff Officer to then Major-General Romeo Dallaire, the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. Major Beardsley was an eyewitness to the genocide in Rwanda and testified for the prosecution in the case against Colonel Theoneste Bagasora, the alleged architect of the Rwandan Genocide, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha Tanzania in 2004.

Major Beardsley collaborated with General Dallaire on the best-selling book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, which was released in Canada in the fall of 2003. Major Beardsley has also collaborated in a number of documentaries, a motion picture, papers, chapters, articles and commemorative events about the Rwandan Genocide.

Major Beardsley resides in Kingston, Ontario with his wife Margaret and children Jessica, Joshua and Jackson. He is currently completing a second graduate degree at RMC focusing on genocide studies and humanitarian intervention.

Doris L. Bergen

Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust; Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich; and numerous articles on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II. Bergen received her PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1991, and has taught at the Universities of Notre Dame and Vermont. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Maureen Hiebert

Maureen S. Hiebert is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law and Society at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She currently teaches courses in comparative politics (Asia) and socio-legal studies and has previously taught courses in comparative genocide in the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto (St. George campus), and has been a guest lecturer on the Cambodian genocide at McMaster University. Prof. Hiebert received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto (March 2007) where she wrote her dissertation, The Origins of Genocide: Political Culture, Crisis, and the Construction of Victims, in which she explored the role played by collective identity construction in the perpetration of the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide. Her research interests include comparative genocide theory and methodology, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, comparative politics, processes of elite decision-making, international humanitarian law and international criminal law. Prof. Hiebert’s publications include “The Three ‘Switches’ of Identity Construction in Genocide: The Nazi Final Solution and the Cambodian Killing Fields,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 3, no. 1 (April 2008), “Theorizing Destruction: Reflections on the State of Comparative Genocide Theory,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 3, no. 3, (December 2008), and “Genocide in Chile? An Assessment” (co-authored with Pablo Policzer) in State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years (2010).

Herbert Hirsch

Herbert Hirsch is Professor of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, where he teaches courses on American politics; political psychology; and the politics of war, violence and genocide. He is the author of several books and numerous articles and book reviews, including Genocide and the Politics of Memory (1995), and Anti-Genocide: Building an American Movement to Prevent Genocide (2002). He has presented papers at The American Political Science Association, International Studies Association, Southwestern Social Science Association, American Historical Association, Southern Political Science Association, Western Political Science Association, Annual Scholar's Conference on The Holocaust, Australian Association of Jewish Studies, Remembering for the Future II, Berlin, Germany, Fourth International Stockholm Forum on Preventing Genocide, and several others. Dr. Hirsch serves on numerous advisory boards and regularly offers a course on The Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at the Virginia Holocaust Memorial Museum. He gave a seminar for the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State about the events in Bosnia in 1992 and has lectured in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Dr. Hirsch was selected as one of 30 scholars to participate in the Goldner Symposium on Post-Holocaust Ethics at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire, England. He is also one of twenty-two scholars whose biography is featured in Pioneers in Genocide Studies: Confronting Mass Death in the Century of Genocide. Dr. Hirsch is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Preventing Genocide in the New Century and is an editor of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal.

William A. Schabas

Professor William A. Schabas is director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he also holds the chair in human rights law. Professor Schabas holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Toronto and LL.B., LL.M. and LL.D. degrees from the University of Montreal, as well as an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University. Professor Schabas is the author of twenty-one books dealing in whole or in part with international human rights law, including Introduction to the International Criminal Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 3rd ed.), Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2009), The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 3rd ed.), International Human Rights and Canadian Law (Toronto, Carswell, 2007, 3rd ed.), The Death Penalty as Cruel Treatment and Torture (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1996) and Précis du droit international des droits de la personne (Montréal, Éditions Yvon Blais, 1997). He received the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law at its 2007 Annual Meeting for his book The UN International Criminal Tribunals: Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone (Cambridge, Cambridge University press, 2006). He has also published more than 250 articles in academic journals, principally in the field of international human rights law and international criminal law. His writings have been translated into several languages, including 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.

Professor Schabas has often been invited to participate in international human rights missions on behalf of non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International (International Secretariat), the International Federation of Human Rights, and the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development to Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Cambodia and Guyana. He was a delegate of the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy to the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, Rome, June 15-July 17, 1998. He is a member of the board of several international human rights organizations and institutions, including the International Institute for Criminal Investigation, of which he is chair, and the International Institute for Human Rights (Strasbourg). In 2006, he was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as a member of the five-person board of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Assistance in the Field of Human Rights.

From 1991 to 2000, William Schabas was professor of human rights law and criminal law at the Département des sciences juridiques of the Université du Québec à Montréal, a Department he chaired from 1994-1998; he now holds the honorary position of professeur associé at that institution. He is also an honorary professor at the Law Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. He has taught as a visiting or adjunct professor at McGill University, Université de Montréal, Université de Montpellier, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, Université de Paris XI, Université de Paris II Pantheon-Assas, Dalhousie University, Université de Genève and National University of Rwanda, and he has lectured at the International Institute for Human Rights (Strasbourg), the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre. He was a member of the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal from 1996 to 2000, and a member of the Quebec Bar from 1985 to 2005. Professor Schabas was a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington during the academic year 1998-99. In 1998, Professor Schabas was awarded the Bora Laskin Research Fellowship in Human Rights by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

In May 2002, the President of Sierra Leone appointed Professor Schabas to the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, upon the recommendation of Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. In 2006, the Secretary-General of the United Nations appointed him a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Assistance in the Field of Human Rights.

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.

Roger Smith

Roger W. Smith is Professor Emeritus of Government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he has taught political theory and the comparative study of genocide. Prof. Smith has written extensively on the nature, language, history and denial of genocide. In addition to numerous articles, he is the editor and co-author of Guilt: Man and Society, and editor of Genocide: Essays Toward Understanding, Early-Warning, and Prevention.

He is a founding member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. As a president of the IAGS, he has spoken extensively on the topic of genocide in the United States, Canada, France and Armenia. In 2000, Prof. Smith gave testimony before the U.S. Congress relating to the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H. Res. 596).

Dr. Smith has been honoured by the Armenian Students Association with the Arthur Dadian Award for the preservation and presentation of Armenian history. In 2008 he was awarded the Movses Khorenatsi Medal by the president of Armenia "for his considerable contribution to the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide." The Khorenatsi medal is the Republic of Armenia's highest award presented by the president to people who have significantly contributed to the advancement of Armenian culture.

Since 2003, he has been the Director of the Genocide and Human Rights University Program, and since 2004, Chair of the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (A Division of the Zoryan Institute).

Samuel Totten

Samuel Totten earned a doctoral degree at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, since 1987. In 2009, he served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda. During the 2009-2010 academic year he is going to hold the Ida King Distinguished Visiting Fellow Chair in the Masters Program of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

During the summer of 2004, Totten served as one of the 24 investigators with the U.S. State Department's Atrocities Documentation Project (ADP), interviewing refugees from Darfur located in camps along the Chad/Sudan border. On September 9, 2004, following his analysis of the data contained in the 1,000 plus interviews conducted by the ADP, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell informed the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had made the determination that the Government of Sudan and Janjaweed had perpetrated genocide against the black Africans of Darfur.

Totten's current research is focused on the current genocide in Darfur, and the status of survivors in post-genocide Rwanda. Over the past four years he has conducted field-based research along the Chad/Darfur border, and throughout Rwanda.

For four years (2000-2005), Totten served as the book review editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. Since 2005 he has served as one of the founding co-editors of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal (University of Toronto Press).

Totten is the Series Editor of Books on Genocide for Transaction Publishers. The most recent books in the series, all of which Totten edited, are: Genocide at the Millennium; The Prevention and Intervention of Genocide; and The Plight and Fate of Women during and Following Genocide. The next two volumes in the series - Genocide of Indigenous Peoples, and The Impediments to the Prevention and Intervention of Genocide - are currently under way.

Totten is the author of numerous articles and two books on genocide, and the editor and co-editor of many edited volumes on genocide. The most recent book he has written, with Dr. Paul Bartrop, is Dictionary of Genocide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers). He is currently completing a book on the crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur: Genocide in Darfur.

Among his edited and co-edited books are: Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Testimony, 3rd edition, New York: Routledge, 2009 (with William S. Parsons); Genocide in Darfur: Investigating Atrocities in the Sudan, New York: Routledge, 2006 (with Eric Markusen); The Prevention and Intervention of Genocide: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Routledge, 2006; Teaching About Genocide, Greenwich, CT: Information Age, 2004; and Pioneers of Genocide Studies, New Brunswick: NJ: Transaction Publishers (with Steven Jacobs).

His articles on the prevention and intervention of genocide, and the genocide in Darfur have appeared in the Journal of Genocide Research, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, Human Rights Review, and Culture and Civilization.

Simon Payaslian

Simon Payaslian is Holder of the Charles K. and Elisabeth M. Kenosian Chair in Modern Armenian History and Literature at Boston University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from WayneSimon Payaslian State University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2003.

His publications include The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present (2007); Armenian Cilicia (co-edited with Richard G. Hovannisian, 2008); United States Policy toward the Armenian Question and the Armenian Genocide (2005); The Armenian Genocide, 1915-1923: A Handbook for Students and Teachers (2001); International Political Economy: Conflict and Cooperation in the Global System (co-authored with Frederic S. Pearson, 1999; Chinese translation, Peking University Press, 2006); and U.S. Foreign Economic and Military Aid: The Reagan and Bush Administrations (1996).

He is the author of several book chapters and articles, including “Imagining Armenia,” in The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present, edited by Athena S. Leoussi, Allon Gal, and Anthony D. Smith (Brill, 2010); “The Fate of the Armenians in Trebizond, 1915,” in Armenian Pontus: The Trebizond-Black Sea Communities , edited by Richard G. Hovannisian (Mazda, 2009); and two articles, “Diaspora” and “Genocide,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, vol. 2 (2008).

Ernesto Verdeja

Ernesto Verdeja is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. He earned his Ph.D. (2005) in political science (political theory) from the New School for Social Research in New York City. His research has focused on large-scale political violence (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity), transitional justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, and trials, truth commissions, apologies, and reparations. Verdeja is the author of Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Temple University Press, 2009), and his work has been published in Constellations, Res Publica, Metaphilosophy, Contemporary Political Theory, The European Journal of Political Theory, and Contemporary Politics. He has also published a book chapter on trials and truth commissions in Genocide War Crimes and the West (Adam Jones, ed.) and a chapter on reconciliation efforts in Latin America in State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years (Marcia Esparza, Henry Huttenbach and Daniel Feierstein, eds.). He also is co-editor of two short books: one on transitional justice and the other on civil society in Cuba. Verdeja is a faculty fellow at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and a core faculty member of the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change, all at Notre Dame, and a board member of the Institute for the Study of Genocide.
Top