The 2025 Program

Alexander Alvarez

Course Manager | 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. His newest forthcoming book is Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals that Made the Holocaust Possible. 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 is also the vice chair of the Academic Advisory Board for the Zoryan Institute, is the course manager for Zoryan’s two week Genocide and Human Rights Graduate Seminar at the University of Toronto, is a member of the Genocide Education Task Force for the state of Arizona which successfully worked to get genocide and Holocaust education mandated in the state, and is one of the organizers and directors of Genocide Awareness Week. He has been invited to speak and present his research across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and South America.  

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). 

Barry Trachtenberg

Wake Forest University

Barry Trachtenberg holds the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, United States. He is a historian of modern European and American Jewry, and the author of three books, The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers, 2022); The United States and the Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008).  

Amy Sodaro

City University of New York

Amy Sodaro is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York/Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her research focuses on memorialization of past violence in memorial museums. She is the author of Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race and Slavery in US Museums (2025) and Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (2018), and co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (2010), Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights (2019) and Museums and Mass Violence (2025). She is an Editor of the Sage journal Memory Studies and co-chair of the Memory Studies Association Museums and Memory working group.

Victoria Sanford

Lehman College

Victoria Sanford is Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College. She was named Lehman Professor of Excellence in 2021. She is a member of the Anthropology Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center and an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, City University of New York. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She was a Bunting Peace Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University and most recently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern California's Center for Advanced Genocide Research. 

She is the author of Genocídio na Guatemala ~ Primeiro general condenado na América Latina. (Editorial Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina and Editora Insular, Brazil, 2024), Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice (University of California 2023). She is also author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2003), Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (FyG Editores 2008), La Masacre de Panzos: Etnicidad, Tierra y Violencia en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2009), Guatemala: Violencia Sexual y Genocidio (FyG Editores 2020 with Sofia Duyos Alvarez & Kathleen Dill) and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is co-editor (with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi) of Gender Violence in Peace and War ~ States of Complicity (Rutgers University Press 2016). She is also co-editor (with Asale Angel Ajani) of Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy and Activism (Rutgers University Press 2008). 

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Her publications in American Anthropologist, The Journal of International Peacekeeping, The Journal of Human Rights, Genocide Studies International, Political Transitions, the Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Cultural Critique, Social Justice, Latin American Perspectives and Harvard’s ReVista have examined the role of truth commissions and NGOs in community healing, local peacebuilding and justice-seeking efforts in Guatemala and Colombia as well as offered anthropological analyses of violence and genocide. She has presented and published  her work in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Canada, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, South Africa, Spain, the UK, Northern Ireland, Austria, Slovenia, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, Norway, England, France, and Germany, among others. She has published opinion editorials in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, El Faro (El Salvador), Plaza Pública (Guatemala), Agencia EFE (Spain), and Billmoyers.com; and, has given some 40 interviews to radio, TV and print media in the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain – including the New York Times, PBS Evening News Hour and CNN. 

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A public anthropologist, in August of 2012, she served as an invited expert witness on the Guatemalan genocide before Judge Santiago Pedraz in the Spanish National Court’s international genocide case against the Guatemalan generals. In 2022, she served as an invited Expert Witness in the landmark Inter-American Court case Caso Comunidad Indigena Q’eqchi’ Agua Caliente v. Guatemala. She won the 2016 University of California Press Public Anthropology competition for her latest book project – The Surge~Central American Border Crossings in the United States, 1980-2015.  She is the recipient of many awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Consortium Fellowship, United States Institute for Peace Fellowship, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellowship and three Fulbright Fellowships, among others. 

Lorena Fontaine

University of Manitoba

Lorena Sekwan Fontaine (BA, LLB, LLM, PhD) is Cree-Anishinaabe, and a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation in Canada. She is currently the Department Head of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba. Fontaine has published extensively on Indigenous language rights and the legacy of residential schools. Her work was featured in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) documentary "Undoing Linguicide." She was also invited as an expert witness to the Canada’s Standing Senate Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples to provide insights on the Indigenous Languages Act. Her most recently publication will be out this fall, Living Language Rights: Constitutional Paths to Indigenous Language Education. Currently she is co-editing a special issue of Genocides Studies International, The Erasure and Revitalization of Indigenous Cultures and Languages.  

Dr. Fontaine has co-organized educational events, including a forum with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and an international conference "Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples" at the University of Southern California, in partnership with the USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research. 

Dr. Fontaine has also served on various national committees, including an Equality Rights Panel member for the Court Challenges Program of Canada and a National Steering Committee Member for the National Association of Women and the Law as well as a board member for the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund.   

In 2022, Dr. Fontaine received a Canada Fulbright Research Chair at San Diego State University, where she explored Indigenous cultural memory and language repatriation. She is also a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal for her community service.   

Henry Theriault

Worcester State University

Henry C. Theriault, Ph.D., is Associate Provost at Worcester State University in the United States, after teaching in its Philosophy Department 1998-2017. He coordinated WSU’s Human Rights Center 1999-2007. With a background in radical social and political as well as continental philosophy, Theriault researches genocide denial, genocide prevention, post-genocide victim-perpetrator relations, reparations, and mass violence against women and girls.  

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He has lectured around the world and published numerous journal articles and chapters. He is lead author of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group’s 2015 Resolution with Justice, and, with Samuel Totten, co-authored The United Nations Genocide Convention:  An Introduction (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and, with Chunhui Peng, coeditor of Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Comprehensive Approach through Theory and Case Studies (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Theriault’s work has appeared in English, Spanish, Armenian, Turkish, and other languages. Theriault served two terms as president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2017-2019 and 2019-2021.

He has been founding co-editor of Genocide Studies International since 2012 and co-edited Genocide Studies and Prevention 2007-2012.  He currently serves as vice-chair of the executive committee of the board of directors of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research and is a member of the Armenian Society of Fellows. 

Jennie Burnet

Georgia State University

Jennie E. Burnet is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA. Her research explores the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of war, genocide, and racial violence and their long-term legacies. For nearly three decades, she has studied the origins, unfolding, and aftermath of the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. Her current research focuses on the long-term legacies of racial violence in the U.S. South and communities’ responses. She is the award-winning author of Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) and of To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue during the Rwandan Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2023).

Her research has appeared in Politics & Gender, African Affairs, African Studies Review, and Women’s Studies International Forum. Dr. Burnet has held grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation; the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the United States Institute for Peace. She has served as an expert witness and consultant for trials heard by U.S. criminal and immigrant courts and has consulted for organizations including USAID, CARE, AfriCare, and the North Carolina Healthy Start Foundation.

Prof. Burnet received her PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. 

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

William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London, emeritus professor at Leiden University and the University of Galway, distinguished visiting faculty at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po, and an associate tenant at 9BR barristers chambers in London.

The third edition of his book Genocide in International Law was published in February 2025. Other recent publications include The International Legal Order’s Colour Line (Oxford, 2023), The Customary International Law of Human Rights (Oxford, 2021) and the published version of the course he delivered at the Hague Academy of International Law in January 2021 entitled Relationships between International Criminal Law and Other Branches of Public International Law.

He has appeared as counsel before the International Court of Justice and the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in cases involving the Genocide Convention. Professor Schabas is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2014 he served as chairman of the UN Commission of Inquiry into the Gaza conflict. 

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.