2005 Participants
Conference Participants
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History and Professor of German Studies at Brown University. He received a Ph.D. in history from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University in 1983 and has been granted numerous fellowships and awards including the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for his book Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford, 1996).
Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, is the former chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1993-2004. Berry was also a founder of the Free South Africa Movement, which instigated protests at the South African Embassy in the struggle for democracy in South Africa. Berry has received 32 honorary doctoral degrees and several awards including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award.
Martha Biondi, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University, received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. She is the author of To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Harvard, 2003), which was awarded the Thomas J Wilson Prize for the best first book of the year. She is currently working on a book about the Black Student Movement and the origins of African American Studies.
David Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard, 2001), which received seven book awards, including the Bancroft Prize. Most recently he served as editor for the companion book to the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Smithsonian, 2004). He is currently writing Freedom Seized and Given: The Emancipation of Wallace Turnage and John Washington.
Guillaume Boccara received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Socials, Paris in 1997. Since 1999, he has been a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Paris focusing on the ethnohistory of the
Mapuche people and the politics of identity in postdictatorship Chile and Argentina. In addition to numerous articles, Boccara is the author of Warfare and Ethnogenesis in Colonial Chile (France, 1998) and the editor of Mestizo Logic in the Americas (Chile, 2000).
Roy L. Brooks is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and University Professor at the University of San Diego. Prior to entering the academy in 1979, Brooks served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for the Honorable Clifford Scott Green of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and practiced corporate law in New York City. His books Rethinking the American Race Problem (University of California, 1992) and Integration or Separation?: A Strategy for Racial Equality (Harvard, 1996) each received the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award for Civil Rights. He is also the author of Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (University of California, 2004).
James T. Campbell, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies, and History at Brown University, is the chair of the University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. His book Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Oxford, 1995) was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Recently he has collaborated with colleagues to create “Freedom Now!,” a website exploring the history of the Mississippi Freedom Movement.
Adrienne Davis, the Reef C. Ivey II Research Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law, is a recent recipient of a Ford Foundation’s grant to research women, slavery, sexuality, and religion. A board member of the Center of the Study for the American South, Davis is also a former editor of the Law and History Review and board member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.
Robert Gooding-Williams is Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University. Formerly the George Lyman Crosby 1896 Professor of Philosophy at Amherst College, Gooding- Williams is the author of several books and essays including, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, 2001) and co-editor of the Bedford Edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1997). He has also been the recipient of numerous academic honors, including Princeton’s Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellowship.
Pablo de Greiff is the Director of Research at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York where he has spearheaded a large-scale project on reparations for victims of human rights abuse to be published as The Oxford Handbook on Reparations (Oxford, 2006). During 2000-2001, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University, and held a concurrent fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Jeffrey Herf, Professor of History at the University of Maryland at College Park, received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1981. His book, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard, 1997) won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London. Herf is currently working on “The Jewish Enemy”: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard, 2006).
Dagmar Herzog is Professor of German and Comparative European History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005), and is the editor of Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Northwestern, 2006). Herzog has also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation among others.
Gerald Jaynes, Director of Graduate Studies in African American Studies and Professor of African American Studies and Economics at Yale University, received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1976. He is the author of Branches Without Roots: The Genesis of the Black Working Class (Oxford, 1986) and co-editor with Robin Williams, Jr. of A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (National Academy, 1989). He is currently working on an inter-university project on economics and the African American citizen since 1865.
Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University. He is the founding Director of Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program and Genocide Studies Program. Kiernan has written many books and articles including How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (Verso, 1985) and The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Yale, 1996). His edited collection Conflict and Change in Cambodia won the Critical Asian Studies Prize for 2002.
Hebe Maria Mattos, Professor of History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil, is the author or co-author of numerous books on Brazilian slavery including Memories of Slavery. Race, Work and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Society in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Civilização Brasileira, 2005) and Colors of Silence. Meanings of Freedom in 19th Brazil (Nova Fronteira, 1998), for which she received the Brazil National Archive Research Award. She has been appointed visiting professor at several institutions including Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and the University of Michigan.
Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy and the John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. Among other honors and awards, McCarthy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2003 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship in 2004. McCarthy has also written numerous books and articles including The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (MIT, 1978) and Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (MIT, 1991).
Uday Mehta is the Clarence Francis Professor in the Social Sciences at Amherst College. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1978 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1984. Mehta is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom (Cornell, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, 2000).
Stephen Pitti, Associate Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University, received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998. He is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (Princeton, 2003) and articles on Chicano history and historiography. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies of Yale’s American Studies Program, and directs the Latina/o History Project, which explores Latino histories in the United States.
Stuart Schwartz, the George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University, received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1968. Specializing in colonial Latin America and early modern expansion, Schwartz has written or edited many books and articles including Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (University of California, 1973), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (University of Illinois, 1992), and Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (Bedford Books, 2000).
Donald W. Shriver, Jr. is Emeritus President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York. An ordained minister, Shriver also holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Society from Harvard University. He has written more than thirteen books including An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford, 1995), and Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds (Oxford, 2005). In 2002, Shriver was the Visiting Senior Scholar of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa.
Graeme Simpson, the Country Program Unit Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, has an LL.B. and an M.A. in history from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He was a founder and Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg and has worked as a consultant in Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Indonesia. He has written extensively on issues of violence in transition in South Africa and is co-editor of Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Witwatersrand, 2002).
John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Smith has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Smith has written or edited eighteen books. His book Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and “The American Negro” (2000) received The Mayflower Society Award for Nonfiction.
Janna Thompson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Deputy Director of Australian Research Council Special Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Melbourne. In addition to many articles, she is the author of Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (Polity, 2002), Discourse and Knowledge: Defense of a Collectivist Ethics (Routledge, 1998), and Justice and World Order: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge 1992). Thompson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Brian Weiner, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, received his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in 1994. His dissertation was nominated for the American Political Science Association’s Best Dissertation in Political Theory. Weiner is author of Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States (Temple, 2004) as well as several articles and reviews.
Deborah White, Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979. In addition to numerous other articles and books, White is the author of Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (W.W. Norton, 1985). The 20th anniversary of its publication was recently celebrated at the 2005 Berkshire Conference on Women and at a conference held at the Huntington Institute in California. White has recently been appointed as a Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellow for 2005-2006 academic year.
Linda Faye Williams, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland at College Park, has served as the Associate Director of Research at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and was a member of the advisory board for the National Latino Political Survey. She is the author of The Long Struggle for Black Political Empowerment and The Constraint of Race, (Penn State, 2003), which was awarded three national book awards. She has also been a member of the editorial boards of the National Journal of Political Science, the American Journal of Political Science, and Urban Affairs Quarterly.