Our Fellows

I am a researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain and a Fulbright fellow at Columbia University. My rather eclectic academic background is in the fields of Sociology, Theology and Religious Studies, and Comparative Literature. I received my Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from UCLouvain (Belgium) and a doctorate in Theology from KU Leuven (Belgium). For the last six years, my research has focused on the intersections of religion, conflict, and collective memory, primarily in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  My project at AHDA, entitled Divided Bridges, aims at (re)discovering peacebuilding potentials in the major religious traditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Religions understand themselves as bridges between people, spiritually grounded instruments of peace. The project is envisaged as a combination of a website, workshops, and public talks. It aspires to provide a platform for open and inclusive discussions about the social role of religion. Far from being apologetic or oblivious towards past crimes, it desires to address “difficult history” in a direct yet responsible way. By engaging in the concrete theological and spiritual heritage of local religious traditions, while remaining conscious of the history of religiously inspired violence, the project aims to develop strong and resilient networks of peace-oriented citizens. 

Dorcas Francis Werson (South Sudan) has an LLB (University of Juba) and a Certificate in Women Leadership Program. she is an Alumina of Young African leadership initiative (YALI) and has over three years of experience in the community development sector, focusing on peacebuilding and human protection. Dorcas has working experience with the Ceasefire Transitional Security Monitoring Mechanism, South Sudan Network for Democratic Election, Forcier Consulting, and volunteer work with the University of Juba Rotaract Club. Currently, Dorcas is an Advocacy officer for the civil society organization The Advocates for Human Rights and Democracy (TAHURID), where she focuses on initiating, designing, and implementing peacebuilding activities and advocating for promotion of Human Rights in the region. She is driven by her commitment to social justice and one day she hopes to witness a completely liberated and equal society.

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.

Nicolas B. Habarugira is a Rwandan social scientist and researcher who has worked with non-governmental organizations for many years in Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region. He is a community worker and human rights activist who worked as a participatory action researcher with the Community Based Sociotherapy Rwanda starting from 2014. The organization promotes psychosocial well-being in Rwanda through interventions focusing on healing, reconciliation and social cohesion. Community Based Sociotherapy addresses post-genocide issues, including trauma healing, reconciliation and restoring the social fabric as a contribution to Rwanda’s transitional justice initiatives.

Korab Krasniqi has expertise in dealing with the past, conflict transformation, and memory work, with proven ability in project management, monitoring and evaluation. He is also engaged in researching collective memory and oral histories of ordinary people, wartime survivors and family members of missing persons. With a background in psychology and political science, Krasniqi is engaged in numerous national, regional and trans-European projects and processes that foster inter-ethnic dialogue, conflict transformation, and reconciliation. He is also a trainer on critical thinking and writing, and activism. Krasniqi’s experience also expands to journalism in written media, translation, emotional support and counselling.

Samantha N. Mandiveyi is a social Lab Associate at Trust Africa for the Gateway Zimbabwe lab, a project that seeks to foster generative and sustainable peace in Zimbabwe by incorporating methodologies such as Process Work & Historical Dialogue.

Mandiveyi is also Director and Editor at Magamba Network that works to create a free and democratic Zimbabwe through creative forms of expression. One of the projects she has directed and edited is Zimbabwe’s first political satire news show, “The Week,” which has generated over two million views. For the William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum of Atlanta, Mandiveyi produced and edited a documentary titled, “They Shall Be Remembered.” It focuses on the personal stories of holocaust survivors in an effort to document their experience and share their stories with future generations long after they are gone.

Linda J. Mann holds a Ph.D in Education Policy from George Mason University. Her scholarship focuses broadly on the history of American education policy, with specializations in education practices during the historical periods of enslavement, Jim Crow, massive resistance and the re-segregation of US public schools. Currently, Mann is the VP of Research for the Georgetown Memory Project (GMP), an independent research institution dedicated to uncovering empirical data on slavery and its modern-day impacts. Since 2015, the GMP has been deeply engaged in the work of systematically identifying and locating nearly 300 enslaved people sold by Georgetown University and the Maryland Jesuits to three sugar plantations in southern Louisiana in 1838 (known as “the GU272”), and tracing their direct descendants. The success of this research has resulted in the unification of families torn apart 150 years ago.

As an AHDA Fellow, Mann will be developing an oral history project to document the voices of the GU272 descendants. This project will explore what restoring justice means to the descendants of enslaved peoples as well as advance our understanding on how institutions can restore justice for their slave pasts and further the narrative on how meaningful repair might be achieved.

Kartika Pratiwi was born in Indonesia and graduated with a Masters’ in Cultural Studies. She has been an independent researcher with an interest in narrative discourse about the 1965 genocide in Indonesia and Chinese-Indonesian issues.

Since 2008, Pratiwi was part of Kotakhitam Forum – an independent organization, dedicated to research, workshops and documentary movie production for social and political changes. During that time, she was involved in producing video archives on Indonesian political history and collective memory as well as the documentary film, Api Kartini (2012). With Kotakhitam Forum, Pratiwi regularly runs projects to facilitate history teachers and youth to use popular media as a learning tool in schools.

Since 2015, she has worked for EngageMedia, a non-profit organization that provides strategies for the effective use of video distribution, connecting video makers, journalists, and activists. In 2017, Pratiwi also served as a John Darling fellow at the Herb Feith Foundation.

Bayar Mustafa Sevdeen is an assistant professor at the College of International Studies at the American University of Kurdistan. He has fifteen years of expertise in supervising and teaching undergraduate and graduate students at a number of universities. Sevdeenhas taught the courses “Turkey and Iran Politics”, “Modern History of Europe”, “Political History of Kurdistan/Iraq and international Issues”. He is currently active in two projects: Politics of Kurds and Kurdistan and the survival and societal transformation among the Yazidis after the last genocide.

In addition, Sevdeen has been working as advisor at the International Middle-East Peace Research Center (IMPR) since 2012. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Peace and Human Security (CPHS) at the American University of Kurdistan (AUK). He has also worked in the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the ‘Turkey division’ as a diplomat  during period from 2010 to 2013.

Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska holds a PhD in anthropology from the Institute of Cultural Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She currently works as an assistant professor at the Jagiellonian University in the Institute of Intercultural Studies and as an academic advisor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. She is a lecturer in the postgraduate studies program: Totalitarianism- Nazism- Holocaust created by the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Talewicz-Kwiatkowska was a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship, grantee of the Leadership Academy for Poland and the European Commission’s program Marie Curie Conferences and training courses entitled “Multi- Disciplinary and Cross-National Approaches to Romany Studies - a Model for Europe”. She has also been part of the U.S. State Department International Visitor Leadership Program.

Latife Uluçınar graduated from Boğaziçi University Department of Philosophy. She attended İstanbul Bilgi University’s Cultural Studies Program, and participated in trainings on non-violence, conflict resolution, peace building, oral history, cinema and photography. Uluçınar coordinated projects on cultural diversity, human rights, intercultural dialogue, women and youth in various non-profit organizations.

Since September 2013, Uluçınar has been working at Anadolu Kültür as a coordinator of the project BAK: Revealing the City through Memory, which brings young people together from different cities in the east and west of Turkey, with the aim of building intercultural dialogue through collaborative artistic productions that focuses on social and collective memory.

Laura Alvarez is a political scientist with an emphasis in democratic governability and international relations. From Cali, Colombia, Laura works at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana's Institute of Intercultural Studies (Instituto de Estudios Interculturales), which is known for its involvement in both scholarly and advocacy work. Laura's position as researcher has enabled her to work on a number of peacebuilding and applied research projects with communities that have been victims of the Colombian conflict, and that are working towards reconciliation. Recent projects include establishing a dialogue between indigenous communities and sugar cane industrialists, and the creation of a regionally-focused post-conflict development plan in Montes de Maria that involved government, women’s and victim’s organizations, and peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.

As an AHDA fellow, Laura plans to develop a project proposal that will focus on collecting stories and testimonies about Colombian victims that have been displaced by violence, suffered human rights violations and later became heroes in their own communities, fostering reconciliation and peace building. These stories will not only be presented as reports on the Colombian post-conflict Truth Commission, but also will be made public through various media resources, so that they can be known and the victims can be acknowledged.

Laura is a Ford Foundation Fellow.

Eylem Delikanli is the co-author of the oral history book Keşke Bir Öpüp Koklasaydım (with Ozlem Delikanli) about the 1980 Coup D’État in Turkey, published in 2013. As an AHDA fellow, Eylem will work on a project titled “Institute of Silence”, which will display crucial historical moments of Turkey on a web platform. In particular, the project seeks to address the silence around the 1980 coup d’état by making publicly available the oral history interviews of those targeted by the Junta. The hope is that these interviews, paired with official documents, will expose and teach users about the human rights violations and mass atrocities that occurred in Turkey during this time.

Eylem is an ISHR Fellow.