Chris Abani is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of seven poetry collections and six novels as well as essays, short stories, and screenplays. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Lannen Literary Fellowship, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, a PEN Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim Award.
Jonathan E. Abel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. His book Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (2012) won the Weatherhead Asia Institute at Columbia University’s first book prize. His current project considers the mass marketing of reverse mimesis when new media are said to transform the world.
Elizabeth S. Anker is Associate Professor in the English Department at Cornell University. Anker is author of Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2012), as well as essays on topics including sovereignty, animal rights, democracy, and constitutionalism. She is currently writing a book about the aesthetic forms that have enabled the globalization of the constitution.
Arturo Arias is Tomas Rivera Regents Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures (1998), as well as a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mulata (2000). In 2008 he received the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement from his native Guatemala.
Ariella Azoulay is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture, Media, and Comparative Literature at Brown University. Among her recent books are Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2012), From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation 1947–1950 (2011), and The Civil Contract of Photography (2008).
Ralph Bauer is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (2003, 2008), An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru (2005), and (co-edited with José Antonio Mazzotti) Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (2009).
Anna Bernard is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (2013) and the co-editor of Debating Orientalism (2013) and What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say (2015).
Brenda Carr Vellino is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University with a focus on transnational human rights poetry and conflict transformation theatre. She has published on Seamus Heaney (Peace Review), on Dionne Brand’s Inventory (University of Toronto Quarterly), and has a chapter on human rights poetry in the Modern Language Association volume Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (2015).
Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on postcolonial Africa, and the intersection of literature and human rights. She is the author of Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (1999) and The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony (2014).
James Dawes is an English professor at Macalester College. He is the author of Evil Men (2013), That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (2007), and The Language of War (2002).
Erik Doxtader is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa. He has published numerous books on transitional justice, the rhetorical dynamics of reconciliation, and the discourse of human rights, including With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa (2009).
Marc D. Falkoff is Associate Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University College of Law. He holds a law degree from Columbia Law School and a doctorate in English literature from Brandeis University. He has been a habeas lawyer for more than a dozen prisoners at Guantánamo since 2004.
Keith P. Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015).
Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg is Professor of English at Babson College. Author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights (2007), she has published numerous articles about literature and human rights, and co-edited, with Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012) and Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (2015).
Audrey J. Golden is an Assistant Professor of English at Coe College. She has previously published on the relationship between justice and global Anglophone literature in Law, Culture and the Humanities and in the Wake Forest Law Review.
Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne. He is Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights and the author or editor of eleven books, including, most recently, Human Rights at the Crossroads (2013, paperback 2014). Current projects include a study of constitutional revolution and the politics of disenchantment in Bolivia.
Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include imperialism and orientalism, together with literature and human rights/social justice.
Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English at Ohio State University. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (1999) and Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011), and co-editor with Wendy Kozol of Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real” (2001) and Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and The Politics of Representation (2005).
Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also the Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (1993), Oscillate Wildly (1999), Imaginary States (2003), and The Long Space (2010). He is currently completing two projects: one on the cultural representation of global labor; the other on commodity critique and new financial instruments.
David Holloway is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Derby, in England. His books include 9/11 and the War on Terror (2008), The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy (2002), and, as contributing co-editor, American Visual Cultures (2005).
Christine Hong is Assistant Professor in Literature and a principal faculty member in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Madelaine Hron is Associate Professor in the English and Film Studies Department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She is the author of Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture (2010), as well as various publications related to Africa, postcolonialism, trauma, and human rights in literature and film.
Meg Jensen is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston University in London. She has published creative writing and literary criticism including We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (with Margaretta Jolly, 2014), “Something Beautiful for Mary” (2012), and The Open Book (2002).
Luz Angélica Kirschner, permanent Full-Time Lecturer at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, edited the volume Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective (2012). Her current research projects include her book manuscript with the working title The Persistence of Racialization: Literature, Gender, and Ethnicity.
Susan Maslan is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (2005, pb 2015) and numerous articles about human rights and literature.
Sophia A. McClennen is Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Global Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her books include Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror (edited with Morello, 2010), Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope (2010), Colbert’s America: Satire and Democracy (2012), Neoliberalism, Terrorism, Education (with Di Leo, Giroux, and Saltman, 2012), and Is Satire Saving Our Nation? (with Maisel, 2014).
Julie Avril Minich is Assistant Professor of English and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (2014).
Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family (2004) and Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture, and co-editor of Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (with Goldberg, 2012), Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (with Goldberg, 2015), and Globally-Networked Teaching in the Humanities: Theories and Practices (with Simon, 2015).
Greg Mullins is Academic Dean of the Library at the Evergreen State College. Author of Colonial Affairs (2002), his current research focuses on cultures of human rights in the United States.
Laura T. Murphy is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Modern Slavery Research Project at Loyola University New Orleans. She is author of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (2014) and Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (2012, winner of the African Literature Association First Book Prize).
Hanna Musiol is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include American literature, visual studies, law and literature, critical theory, archive and curation, and digital humanities. She is the creator of the (Im)Migrant Experience Initiative (IEI), an open-access digital archive devoted to the preservation of narratives of migration and displacement at UMass Boston.
Makau Mutua is the SUNY Distinguished Professor and the Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School. His many publications include Kenya’s Quest for Democracy: Taming Leviathan (2008), Human Rights NGOs in East Africa: Political and Normative Tensions (2008), and Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (2002).
Zoe Norridge is a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London, specializing in cultural responses to the genocide in Rwanda. In 2014 she curated the exhibition Rwanda in Photographs: Death Then, Life Now at Somerset House with Mark Sealy MBE and presented the BBC Radio 3 documentary, “Living With Memory in Rwanda.”
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford. His most recent books are The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (2012) and a co-edited volume, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (2011). He blogs for Truthout, The Nation, Salon, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. @palumboliu
Crystal Parikh is Associate Professor at New York University in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of English. She is the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (2009). She is currently completing her second monograph, Writing Human Rights.
Katrina M. Powell is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her first book, The Anguish of Displacement (2007), examined displacement narratives by families relocated through eminent domain. Her most recent book, Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement (2015), examines displacement narratives and human rights rhetorics across transnational contexts.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (2008) and the editor of a special Comparative American Studies issue on comparative border studies (2011) as well as of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (2002).
Mark Sanders is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory (2006), and Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (2007). He recently completed a book entitled Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa.
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Humanistic Studies of Human Rights at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the editor of Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theatre (2013) and The Aesthetics of Human Rights, Academic Quarter (with Dorfman, 2012).
Joseph R. Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek Prize for comparative literary and cultural theory.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and a core member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. She is the author of Human Rights In Camera (2011).
Sidonie Smith is Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. Her recent books include Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (with Schaffer, 2004); and the second, expanded edition of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (with Watson, 2010).
Domna C. Stanton, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, teaches early-modern French studies, feminist and critical theory, and human rights. After The Dynamics of Gender in Early-Modern France (2014), she is working on Les femmes en littérature (Gallimard, 2016).
Sarah G. Waisvisz received her PhD in English from Carleton University (Ottawa) in 2014. Her dissertation examines the contemporary “diasporic maroon witness” and the “literary revolutions” being undertaken by contemporary Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean women writers. Recent publications include two co-authored pieces with Brenda Vellino in College Literature and Canadian Literature.
Belinda Walzer is a Lecturer at Northeastern University. Her research is located at the intersections of rhetorical theory, human rights discourse, and transnational feminism and centers on the normativity of human rights. She teaches writing, rhetoric, literature, global communications and gender studies and has published essays in College Literature, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Comparative Literature Studies, and several edited collections.
Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Sublime of History (1997), Illuminations from the Past (2004), and History and Memory (2004). His scholarship focuses on aesthetics, Chinese literature, international politics, and film studies.
Julia Watson is Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. She and Sidonie Smith have co-authored Reading Autobiography (2010) and co-edited five collections and several essays on autobiography. Watson’s recent essays are on graphic memoir, posthumanism, voice, and, with Smith, online life narrative.
Gillian Whitlock is a Professor at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Traditions (2015) in the Oxford Postcolonial Literature series. Her current research project is “The Testimony of Things,” a study of asylum seeker archives.
Sarah Winter is Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, and a faculty affiliate at the UConn Human Rights Institute. Her publications in literature and human rights have appeared in NOVEL, Comparative Literature Studies, and the Modern Language Association volume Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies.