Grace Bickers

Grace Bickers graduated with honors from Columbia College in 2014, majoring in Human Rights with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies. Her undergraduate thesis, an abridged version of which won the 2016 Ignacio Martín-Baró Human Rights Essay Competition at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights (University of Chicago), analyzed the lack of accountability mechanisms within the economic, social, and cultural human rights regime, arguing that an over reliance on state-based checks on power and state-granted rights leaves people without meaningful modes of legally accessing universal rights. As her research focused in particular on the case of Tajikistan, she traveled there to live and teach after receiving her B.A. While at Columbia, Grace worked for two years as a research assistant with the Presbyterian Ministry at the United Nations.

After obtaining an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, Grace is back at Columbia, where she is now a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion studying medieval Islamic history.