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2021-2022 marks the 10th year of the AHDA fellowship program. Since 2012, the fellowship has hosted at least 107 fellows who represent over 48 countries and territories. Below please find information regarding the professional interests and accomplishments of fellows and alumni. While at Columbia, fellows design individual projects that address some aspect of a history of gross human rights violations in their society, country, and/or region.
Click here to read more about the fellows' projects.
Click here to read about more about the work of our Fellows.
Dilpreet Bhullar is a writer-researcher based in New Delhi, India. She has an MPhil from the University of Delhi in Comparative Literature with a dissertation entitled “Mapping Colonial Gazing(s): A Study of the People of India (1868–75)”. Her research work delves into the concept of memory in the (post) conflict area, and explores photography as a tool to document the alternate history. Her essays on visual sociology, identity politics and refugee studies have been published in books, journals and magazines including Designing (Post) Colonial Knowledge: Imagining South Asia (Routledge), The Third Text (Routledge), South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge), Indian Journal of Human Development (Sage Publications), Himal Southasian, and the digital archive www.criticalcollective.in, to name a few. She is currently the associate editor of the India Habitat theme-based journal on visual arts, published by India Habitat Centre.
Sarah C. Bishop is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her recent book, U.S. Media and Migration: Refugee Oral Histories won a 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association as well as the 2017 Sue DeWine Distinguished Scholarly Book Award.
Bishop specializes in research concerning the interactions of nationalism, citizenship, migration, and media. Her second book, Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. At Baruch, Bishop teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate classes in Gender/Race/Ethnicity in Communication, Media and Migration, Global Communication, Privilege and Difference, and Digital Media Culture.
Bonita Bennett is Director of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to this, Bennett worked as a youth worker for the Diocese of Cape Town, a high school teacher, a project manager for the South African Institute of Race Relations, and as a research and project manager for the African Tenants Verification Project of the Western Cape Land Claims Commission. Bennett’s work in the non-profit and public sector has sought to bring together her pedagogical training and her political activism, and she has combined skills gleaned during the days of the anti-apartheid struggle with her formal training to inform her approach to her position as Director of the District Six Museum. As an AHDA fellow, Bennett will develop school curricula that use moments in South Africa’s national history—employing storytelling, performance, creative writing, the arts, and history—to illuminate current realities and link the past to the present, with the overarching message that the past matters.
Whitney M. Young Fellow
Friederike Bubenzer is Senior Project Leader in the Justice and Peacebuilding Programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa. In this capacity she contributes to the building of peacebuilding, social cohesion and reconciliation processes with policy makers and civil society leaders in South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Kenya. She also coordinates IJR’s Transitional Justice in Africa Fellowship and Alumni Programme. She is the co-editor of ‘Hope, Pain and Patience: The Lives of Women in South Sudan’ (Jacana, 2011) and is passionate about furthering inclusive dialogue and action around social justice issues across Africa.
She is currently working on a research project on the interconnectedness between mental health and peace building. This is a collaboration between IJR and the War Trauma Foundation and feeds on from an international conference and its outcome report. The hypothesis underlying this study is that communities are likely to continue to be caught in cycles of pain and conflict if historical and intergenerational trauma is not acknowledged and integrated into long-term post-conflict reconstruction and social transformation efforts (including historical dialogue). Ms Bubenzer is also the IJR coordinator of a collaborative project between IJR and Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the University of Stellenbosch titled ‘Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past’ which seeks to understand manifestations of intergenerational trauma in South Africa.
Ms. Bubenzer holds an MPhil in Development Studies and Social Transformation from the University of Cape Town and undergraduate degrees in International Relations from the University of Stellenbosch.
Sadiah Boonstra is currently a Project Associate at the International Institute for Asian Studies, in the Netherlands. In addition Sadiah is a freelance museum curator and previously worked as an exhibition maker and curator in various national museums in the Netherlands. She is also finishing her PhD at the Department of History at VU University in Amsterdam, where she has worked as a lecturer. As an AHDA fellow, Ms. Boonstra will develop a project that examines the mass killings that followed the violent coup attempt in Indonesia in 1965-66. Official historical discourse on the period was controlled throughout the rule of Suharto, and academic discussions have had limited success in terms of opening discussion. This project seeks to use audiovisual technology to collect the testimony of victims and their families and to create a platform for alternative histories that maps sites of violence; that opens up discussion of these events further; and that convinces the government to consider more openly the events of this period.
