About the Institute

Overview
Faculty
Staff
Steering Committee
Annual Reports
Support Us
Contact
Newsletter

Meet Our Faculty

Jo Becker

Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs

Jo Becker

Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs

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, Nepal, 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.

Louis Bickford

Adjunct Professor of Political Science

Louis Bickford

Adjunct Professor of Political Science

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 a member of the Executive Leadership team, and as the director of the European Office. He has consulted with various national and international institutions including the United Nations and various philanthropic foundations in every world region. He has a PhD from McGill University and an MA from the New School, both in Political Science. He is currently the Founder and CEO of MEMRIA (www.memria.org), a social enterprise which develops partnerships with organizations to collect, analyze, and circulate narrative accounts of past violence with the aim of strengthening human rights.

Michael Bochenek

Lecturer

Michael Bochenek

Lecturer

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.

Noah Chasin

Adjunct Associate Professor

Noah Chasin

Adjunct Associate Professor

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.

Belinda Cooper

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Belinda Cooper

Adjunct Assistant Professor

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.

Bruce Cronin

Adjunct Professor

Bruce Cronin

Adjunct Professor

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

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

Paisley Currah

Adjunct Professor

Paisley Currah

Adjunct Professor

Paisley Currah works in the intersections of gender and sexuality studies, law and policy, social and political theory, LGBT and transgender studies. He teaches a course at Columbia University on sexual orientation, gender identity, and human rights. Currah has written widely on transgender issues, including on topics such as discrimination and sex reclassification, and the transgender rights movement. He is the author and editor of over 30 articles and books and co-founder of the leading journal in transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Currah’s newest book, Sex Is Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, examines state policies on sex reclassification and reveals the hidden logics that have governed these often contradictory policies. He is currently working on a book comparing the transgender rights movement with womens’ movements.

Currah co-edited, with Shannon Minter and Richard Juang, Transgender Rights, the first book on the movement for transgender rights, which won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Currah has advocated for transgender rights as a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute, as a member of the board of directors Global Action for Trans Equality, and as a member of the advisory board of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Program. Currah led the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies from 2003-2007.

Currah received an MA and PhD in Government from Cornell University and a BA (Hon.) in Political Studies from Queen's University at Kingston, Canada.

Click here to learn more about Paisley Currah.

Jackie Dugard

Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Department of Political Science

Jackie Dugard

Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Jackie is a Senior Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Political Science, Columbia University. She is currently part of a multi-country Research Council of Norway-funded project, “Pluriland”, which seeks to understand the impact on human security of enacting plural land rights in constitutions and law. Jackie is the leader of the workstream on Land and Housing for the UN-funded project, “Making Prevention a Reality: A Framework Approach”. Together with a colleague from the University of the Witwatersrand, Joel Quirk, Jackie is editing a forthcoming special issue of the South African Journal on Human Rights (SAJHR) on Gender-Based Violence at universities.

With a background in law and social sciences - BA (Hons) & LLB (Wits); MPhil & PhD (Cambridge); and LLM (Essex) - Jackie focuses on power and exclusion. She has published widely on socio-economic rights (especially the rights to housing, land and water), property law, access to justice, the role of law and courts in social change, protest and social movements, and gender-based violence. Jackie is the lead co-editor (Jackie Dugard, Bruce Porter, Daniela Ikawa and Lilian Chenwi) of Edward Elgar’s (2020) Research Handbook on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights. Her recent published articles include: Jackie Dugard (2022) “Water rights struggles in Johannesburg and Detroit revisited: Looking beyond courts at the politics and power of rights-based legal mobilization in a neoliberal global order - a ‘powerpack’ analysis”, Journal of Human Rights Practice; and Jackie Dugard (2021) “Evaluating transformative constitutionalism in South Africa: A view from the mineral rights adjudication looking glass”, 39 Nordic Journal of Human Rights 373-390.

Between 2014 and June 2022, Jackie was an Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where she taught Property Law, Jurisprudence and Bill of Rights, and where she is now a Visiting Professor. Jackie was a co-founder and the first Executive Director of the non-governmental organization, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and the founding first 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 Associated Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway). She is an Affiliate at the Center for Human Rights & Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University’s School of Law. Jackie is an editor of the SAJHR.

Tracey Holland

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Tracey Holland

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Dr. Tracey Holland earned her M.A. in International Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and her Ph.D. in International Education from New York University. Her research focuses on international educational development with an emphasis on migration and human rights. She has taught Middle School in Washington Heights, NYC, where she started a newcomer program for immigrant students. As a consultant to UNDP, UNICEF, USAID, and several international NGOS, she has helped design national education programs in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Jamaica, and trained educators in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Angola. In the early 1990s, she founded a workshop-school for street and working children in Managua, Nicaragua.

Click here to learn more about Professor Holland.

Daniela Ikawa

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Daniela Ikawa

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Daniela Ikawa teaches Introduction to Human Rights and Equality, Identity and Rights in the Human Rights Studies M.A. Program.She is a legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative. She was formerly the Coordinator of the Working Group on Strategic Litigation at the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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) and PILnet (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 over twenty 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

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).

Glenn Mitoma

Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Department of Political Science

Glenn Mitoma

Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Glenn Mitoma is a 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.

Shourideh Molavi

Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Department of Anthropology

Shourideh Molavi

Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

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 15 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 a Lead Researcher on Israel-Palestine and fieldworker with 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: Coloniality and Seeing New Landscapes of Resistance (Pluto Press, 2024 forthcoming); and Interrogating the Citizen: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Exclusion and Global Citizenship Restrictions (I.B. Tauris, 2024 forthcoming). Shourideh’s past and ongoing investigations with Forensic Architecture can be found here.

Andrew Nathan

Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science

Department of Political Science

Andrew Nathan

Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science

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.

Julie Rajan

Adjunct Lecturer

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Julie Rajan

Adjunct Lecturer

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

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

Joseph Slaughter

Associate Professor

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Department of English and Comparative Literature

Joseph Slaughter

Associate Professor

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

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,” forthcoming 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.

Tim Wyman-McCarthy

Associate in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Department of Sociology

Tim Wyman-McCarthy

Associate in the Discipline of Human Rights

Institute for the Study of Human Rights

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is an Associate in the discipline of Human Rights 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.

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. He holds a BAH in English Literature and History (Queen's), MSt. in English Language and Literature (Oxford), MA in Human Rights (Columbia), and PhD Rhetoric (UC Berkeley).