Belinda Cooper is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights and New York University's Center for Global Affairs. Cooper teaches and lectures on human rights and international law, with a particular focus on transitional justice, war crimes tribunals, and women’s rights. She led an NYU study trip to The Hague, Bosnia and Serbia for several years and participated in a similar trip to Rwanda. She is the editor of War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, which explored the interconnections between the Nuremberg tribunal and today's international criminal tribunals.
Cooper’s experience has included working with East German dissidents before the fall of communism, assisting the lawyers for a German Guantanamo detainee, organizing a project on memorialization of the past in Turkey, and coauthoring reports on domestic violence in Tanzania, Armenia and Uzbekistan. She has written for a wide variety of print and online publications and participated in numerous panels and discussions in the US and abroad. She lived in Berlin, Germany, for many years and is a translator of German scholarly books and articles, including many texts on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and textbooks on international criminal law and transitional justice.
Cooper holds a law degree from Yale Law School and has taught human rights, international law, transitional justice and women and the law at The New School, Brooklyn College, Ohio Northern University Law School, Seton Hall Law School and Humboldt University in Berlin.
She is co-founder and president of Brooklyn Animal Action, an animal rescue non-profit.
