Our Fellows

Ngozika Anthonia Obi-Ani is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She did her PhD on “the Nigeria-Biafra war and the Occupation of Nsukka and Enugu Areas:1967-1979”. Her research focuses on social and political history, women, gender and conflict studies. Ngozika Anthonia is currently working on, “Uneasy Peace since the Civil War: A Bottom-Up Approach Perspective”. She is a member of Historical Society of Nigeria, Lagos Studies Association (LSA), Conflict Research Network West Africa (CORN) and an African Humanities Program (AHP) fellow. She is also an alumni of Partnership for African Social & Governance Research (PASGR), Nairobi, Kenya.

Selbi Durdiyeva has completed her PhD from Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, on the topic: "Reimagining the Role of Civil Society in Transitional Justice Processes in Russia relating to the Soviet Repressions." She has an LLM in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law from the University of Essex, UK and an LLM in International Law from KIMEP University, Kazakhstan. She was a Global Dialogues Fellow at the Transregional Center of Democratic Studies at the New School of Social Research.

Claudia González-Pérez is a Political Scientist, Specialist in Theories and Experiences in Armed Conflict Resolution, Ethnic Communities Land Restitution, and Historical Memory. Claudia develops innovative community resources based on traditional conceptions of body, land, uses of property, comparative political thought to bear on issues of global justice, peacebuilding, transitional justice, conflict prevention, gender, and indigenous political thought. She is a creator of the conceptual & methodological program; “I am memory: Memory, Body, Territory” for Casa De La Mujer, Program awarded with Honorary Mention of the Antonio Nariño Human Rights Award in 2018. Claudia carried over this work to San Francisco (CA) strengthening the agenda of Colombians and non-Colombian immigrants, survivors of political violence in exile. 

Gabriela Guzman is a Human Rights Officer at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, where she supports the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. For the past ten years, her work as a human rights officer at the UN has mainly focused on issues related to enforced disappearances and violence against women. Prior to joining the United Nations, Gabriela worked in academia, civil society and the public sector in Mexico City. She completed her BA in International Relations at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City, and holds a master's degree in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford in the UK. As an AHDA Fellow, Gabriela’s project will document the work of family-led collectives advocating and searching for disappeared persons in Mexico.

Pedro J. González Corona is a human rights advocate, researcher and educator. He works as Assistant to the Director and Assistant Professor of Instruction and has worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. His academic interests are state sponsored violence, racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Pedro has vast experience as an academic administrator who develops curricula, training workshops, and international academic collaborations between Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, UTD, and various educational institutions, human rights museums, and collectives throughout Mexico and Latin America. He earned a master’s degree with a focus on human rights from the Southern Methodist University, and a doctoral degree on the history of ideas from the University of Texas at Dallas. His most recent collaborations include the panel “Enforced Disappearances and Grassroots Collective Resistance in Mexico” presented at LASA 2021; a series of conversations with Holocaust survivor Pieter Kohnstam, who shares his personal history with the public to promote human rights awareness; and a ten seminar series on antisemitism in Latin American curated for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

Jovana Kolarić is a researcher in Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) since 2012. She engaged in the projects "Register of Croatian Citizens of Serbian Ethnicity, Killed in the Armed Conflict in Croatia" and "Human Losses in Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia", in order to complete the register of persons killed and missing during the armed conflicts. Jovana conducted more than 700 interviews with members of the victim’s families and eyewitnesses. Since 2017, Jovana is working as a researcher on the project "Dossiers - Search for War Crimes Perpetrators", where, through the analysis of collected documentation (statements of witnesses, eyewitnesses, survivors, military and police documents), she compiles Dossiers with an aim to present to the general public evidence and information on mass crimes whose perpetrators have not yet been brought to justice. So far, Jovana is the author of five dossiers that deal with events in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991 to 1995. Jovana graduated in Sociology from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad and completed several informal trainings in the field of transitional justice and conflict theory. 

Adam Kyomuhendo is an Advocate of the Supreme Court and all courts of judicature in Uganda. He specializes in human rights and public interest litigation, with a special emphasis on the rights of minorities and indigenous populations. Adam has more than seven years’ practical experience of litigating imperatives of social justice and human rights in international courts, including the East African Court of Justice. Adam co-founded and is leading the Indigenous Peoples Strategy Forum (IPSF) – a non-profit Pan-African platform, that campaigns for the rights and cultures of the indigenous populations of Africa. He is a member of the Uganda Law Society, East African Law Society, International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Commission on Environmental Law (the Climate Change and Forests Thematic Committees). 

Mphathisi Ndlovu is a lecturer in the department of Journalism and Media Studies at the National University of Science and Technology (Zimbabwe). He has a Doctorate in Journalism from Stellenbosch University (South Africa), and a Masters in Journalism and Media Studies from Rhodes University (South Africa). Mphathisi is also a recipient of the following research awards: a research fellowship from the department of Journalism at Stellenbosch University, and an academic fellowship at Africa No Filter (ANF). Mphathisi’s research interests are in collective memory, identity politics and media theory. He has several publications which include book chapters, and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as African Journalism Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Critical Arts, Communicatio, Journal of Genocide Research, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies. Mphathisi is also a co-founder of the Humanities Research Institute of Africa (HRIA), a research initiative in Zimbabwe which is dedicated to nurturing critical thinking and mentoring emerging scholars in the humanities. 

Rebecca O. Johnson is a writer, social justice organization capacity builder and activist living in Bronx, NY. She writes to consider the many environments we occupy, and currently is focused on the landscape of dispossession, including destruction of Black communities by industrial toxins, White land theft and inequitable response to “natural” disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Rebecca’s capacity building primarily supports Black-led organizations in the South and West of the United States addressing the historical legacies of enslavement, Jim Crow era apartheid and ongoing structural racism in the US. She has been published in Callaloo, Race- Talk, The Women’s Review of Books, Social Justice Journal and many other publications. Rebecca holds an MS in Community Economic Development and an MFA in non-fiction. 

Pınar Sayan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Beykoz University, Visiting Scholar at University of Cambridge and Scholar at Istanbul Political Research Institute. She received Bachelor’s degree from Marmara University; Master’s degrees from Boğaziçi University and London School of Economics; and PhD degree from Marmara University. She is a recipient of the Jean Monnet Scholarship, Humanity in Action Pat Cox Fellowship, Swedish Institute Fellowship, Georg Eckert Institute Fellowship among others and was a visiting researcher at Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies and Georg Eckert Institute. Previously, she acted as the Turkey Director of Imagine Center for Conflict Transformation and co-editor of Caucasus Edition: Journal of Conflict Transformation. She takes part in civil society projects addressing conflict transformation, human rights and minority rights as coordinator, consultant, trainer or facilitator.  

Marigona Shabiu is a human rights activist from Kosovo. Since 2017 she has been working as Executive Director at Youth Initiative for Human Rights – Kosovo (YIHR KS), leading a multi-ethnic group of young people who are working towards fostering a free, equal, just and peaceful society in Kosovo as well as in the Western Balkans region. Marigona holds a Master's Degree in Public Affairs from the Indiana University Bloomington in the United States. While doing her graduate studies, she completed an internship at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. In 2014, Marigona founded a youth NGO in her hometown focused on human rights, inter-cultural dialogue and youth empowerment. She has more than eight years of experience in the civil society sector working with different local and international NGOs. Marigona is a passionate activist for human rights, peace and gender equality. 

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. 

Catherine Kennedy is an archival activist and civil society consultant from South Africa. Since 2018, she has managed the Constitutional Court Trust, a non-profit organisation that exists to promote human rights, the rule of law, constitutionalism and judicial independence in the African region - with a special focus on the Constitutional Court of South Africa.  She also currently consults for the Javett Foundation, a philanthropic foundation with a focus on education, culture and the arts, and a human rights organisation in Zimbabwe. From 2009 – 2016, she was the Director of the South African History Archive (SAHA), an independent human rights archive with a special focus on the records of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She has been a board member of GALA, a queer activist archive, since 2009, and recently joined the board of the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria. Over the last decade, she has also provided short-term archival consultancy and training in various conflict and post-conflict contexts internationally in support of dealing with the past initiatives.

Kaltrina Krasniqi is an award winning Kosovo based film director and researcher working in film, television and digital humanities since the early 2000s. She is a founding member of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative – a digital archive where personal histories of individuals from various paths of life are recorded and published, and she is a co-founder of the popular Prishtina café-bookshop Dit’ e Nat’ which is a non formal setting for promotion of film, literature and music. She graduated with a degree in  Film Directing from the University of Prishtina in 2004 and in 2011 completed her MA at Kosovo’s Institute for Journalism and Communication. In 2015, she continued her professional development at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a focus in Film Producing. Her last film Sarabande (2018) premiered at ZagrebDox, was awarded Best Documentary from the Cinalfama Film Festival and was a nominee in the short documentary competition at Camerimage Festival 2018. Currently, she is producing her first feature film, “Vera Dreams of the Sea”.

Simon K. Li is the Executive Director of the Hong Kong Holocaust and Tolerance Centre. He has researched and taught about upstanders and the broad category of bystanders for a variety of organizations including the Anne Frank House (The Netherlands), Facing History and Ourselves (USA), Yad Vashem (Israel), Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (Taiwan), the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (China), and the Red Cross (Hong Kong). His doctoral research examines ordinary citizens’ use of private probes as strategic resistance against bureaucratic cover-ups. In addition to these academic pursuits, he is the co-host of a weekly Cantonese-language history radio program on historical archives and declassified records with the former Director of the Government Records Service of Hong Kong. Previously an investigative journalist and broadcaster, he was a summer host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship morning current affairs radio program The Current. As a Historical Dialogue & Accountability Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Simon will be investigating the forgotten Chinese victims in the Holocaust, in the hope of uncovering their buried World War II history  and contributing to making sure that this memory does not die.