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Each year, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights welcomes a select number of visiting scholars to conduct research on a variety of human rights topics. Past visiting scholars have included federal judges, attorneys, trailblazers in NGO advocacy, academics and medical doctors. These scholars have come from more than 35 countries and form an essential part of ISHR’s global community of human rights researchers, scholars, and advocates.
Prospective scholars and others interested in researching human rights are encouraged to explore the biographies of some of our recent scholars below. Use the tabs below to sort through our scholars by research specialization. Click here for a list of additional visiting scholars.
To learn more about the Visiting Scholars Program and how to apply, click here.
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Radwan Ziadeh is the Head of the Syrian Commission for Transitional Justice established by the Syrian Interim Government to work on the transitional justice. He is the founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Syria and co-founder and executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the managing editor of the Transitional Justice in the Arab World Project. He is also a member of the Syrian National Preparatory committee for Transitional Justice. He was involved in documenting the ongoing human rights violations in Syria and testified at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. He was elected in October 2011 as director of the Foreign Relations Office of the Syrian National Council until he resigned from the position in November 2012. In 2009 he was awarded the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Academic Freedom award in Boston; and in 2010 he accepted the Democracy Courage Tributes award on behalf of the human rights movement in Syria, given by the World Movement for Democracy in Jakarta, Indonesia. His most recent book is Power and Policy in Syria: Intelligence Services, Foreign Relations and Democracy in the Modern Middle East (I.B.Tauris, 2011).
Jarrett Zigon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include morality, subjectivity, and institutional spaces of disciplinary practice. These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropologist strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian phenomenology and critical theory. He has completed two research projects in Russia: one on the relationship between personal experience and moral conceptions, and a second on Russian Orthodox Church drug rehabilitation programs as spaces for moral training. His current research focuses on human rights as a transnational moral discourse. His articles can be found in Anthropological Theory, Ethnos, and Ethos among other journals. His books including Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (2008, Berg), Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Narratives of Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow (2010, Brill),and HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (2011, University of California Press).
Ze Hua, a director of documentary films from China, is a human rights activist. With a master degree in law, she has devoted herself deeply in freedom of speech and human rights issues in China, making documentaries of China's civil rights movement. At Columbia, she researched "A Case Study of Three Chinese Human Rights Lawyers (Xu ZhiYong, Pu ZhiJiang and Teng Biao.)
