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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.

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.

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).