Meet Our Faculty

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

Elsa Stamatopoulou joined Columbia University in 2011 after a 31-year service at the United Nations (in Vienna, Geneva and New York) with some 22 years dedicated to human rights, in addition to 8 years exclusively devoted to Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Indigenous issues were part of her portfolio since 1983 and she became the first Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2003. In 2011, she taught the first-ever course at Columbia on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, in 2016, the first course on cultural rights and is the first Director of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia. She is also co-founder and was co-chair of Columbia’s University Seminar on Indigenous Studies from its inception in 2014 to 2020.