About ISHR

  • About ISHR
  • Board of Directors
  • Staff
  • Open Positions
  • Internships
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ISHR Staff

Elazar Barkan 
Director

Elazar Barkan is a Professor of International and Public Affairs and the Director of the Human Rights Concentration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was the founding director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) in The Hague. Professor Barkan served on ISHR’s board of directors before becoming ISHR’s co-director in 2007 and director in 2008. Previously, Professor Barkan served as chair of the History Department and the Cultural Studies Department at the Claremont Graduate University, where he was the founding director of the Humanities Center. Professor Barkan is a historian by training and received his PhD from Brandeis University. His research interests focus on human rights and on the role of history in contemporary society and politics and the response to gross historical crimes and injustices. His human rights work seeks to achieve conflict resolution and reconciliation by bringing scholars from two or more sides of a conflict together and employing historical methodology to create shared narratives across political divides.  A recent pertinent article: “Historians and Historical Reconciliation,” (AHR Forum)   American Historical Review, (October 2009). Professor Barkan’s other current research interests include refugee repatriation, comparative analysis of historical commissions, shared sacred sites, and the question of human rights impact, specifically with regard to redress and transitional justice. His recent books include No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (with Howard Adelman, Columbia University Press 2011, forthcoming); The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (2000); Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity, (an edited volume with Ronald Bush, Getty, 2003); and Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (an edited volume with Alexander Karn, Stanford University Press, 2006).

Yasmine Ergas 
Associate Director

Ms. Ergas, a lawyer and sociologist who also serves as an adjunct associate professor of International Law and International Human Rights Law at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a graduate of the Universities of Sussex and Rome and Columbia Law School. Her experience spans research, teaching and legal practice, program-building and administration, and human rights activism. She is a former member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University; and a Pembroke Fellow of Brown University. Among other honors, she has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation and the Italian Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca. Ms. Ergas served on the staff of the Social Science Research Council where she developed programs focused on the social consequences of HIV/AIDS, staffed the Committee on Western Europe, and administered major fellowship programs. She has been a consultant to key international organizations, including the OECD and UNESCO. More recently, she served as the coordinator of, and an adviser to, the gender program of the Millennium Village Project. Ms. Ergas has been involved in Human Rights Watch for many years, chairs the advocacy committee of its New York Committee, and attended the signing of the Convention on Cluster Munitions as part of the HRW delegation in Copenhagen in December 2009. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, the Scientific Council of the Centro di Ricerca sul Sistema Sud e il Mediterrraneo Allargato of Universita’ Cattolica di Milano, and the board of New York City Global Partners. Ms. Ergas has published extensively, focusing particularly on women’s rights, public policies, and social movements. Her work has been published in English, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.

J. Paul Martin 
Senior Scholar

Professor Martin, together with Professor Louis Henkin (University Professor Emeritus/Special Service Professor, Columbia University), founded ISHR (then the Center for the Study of Human Rights) in 1978, and served as its executive director through June 2007. Before coming to Columbia to complete his PhD at Teachers College (with a dissertation on education in Africa during the 19th century), he spent several years as a missionary and university teacher in Africa. Over the years, Professor Martin’s primary research interest has been human rights education, especially in Africa, as well as religion and human rights. Currently, his work is focused on the impact of multinational corporations on developing countries from a human rights perspective.

Stephanie V. Grepo 
Director, Capacity Building

Stephanie V. Grepo joined ISHR in August 2008. She leads the Human Rights Advocates Program (HRAP), an annual training program for human rights activists from around the world. Ms. Grepo has increased funding for the Program, thereby allowing more Advocates to participate in an enhanced HRAP. She is currently a part-time lecturer at The New School. From 2000 to 2007, Ms. Grepo was seconded by the U.S. Department of State to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest regional security organization. She organized elections and developed multi-ethnic experiential education programs in Kosovo, managed confidence-building projects in the former crisis region of Macedonia, worked on return and integration issues and led a field office of 10 staff in central Croatia, and served as the youth and education advisor in Serbia. She earned a master’s degree in human rights from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Previously, she worked as an editor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kristina Eberbach 
Director, Education

Ms. Eberbach joined ISHR as interim director of capacity-building programs in August 2008 and served as program coordinator before becoming director of education prorgams in August 2010. She received her Masters of International Affairs in 2008 from SIPA, where she concentrated in human rights. She earned her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Her interest in human rights in conflict and transitional contexts led her to pursue research and programmatic work in Kenya, The Netherlands, Uganda, and South Africa.

David L. Phillips 
Director, Peace Building and Rights Program

David L. Phillips is currently Director of the Program on Peacebuilding and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Phillips has worked as a senior adviser to the United Nations Secretariat and as a foreign affairs expert and senior adviser to the U.S. Department of State. He has held positions as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies, executive director of Columbia University’s International Conflict Resolution Program, director of the Program on Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at the American University, Associate Professor at New York University’s Department of Politics, and as a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He has also been a senior fellow and deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, director of the European Centre for Common Ground, project director at the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo, president of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, and executive director of the Elie Wiesel Foundation. Mr. Phillips is author of From Bullets to Ballots: Violent Muslim Movements in Transition (Transaction Press, 2008), Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Perseus Books, 2005), Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation (Berghahn Books, 2005). He has also authored many policy reports, as well as more than 100 articles in leading publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Affairs.

Danielle Goldberg 
Program Coordinator, Peace Building and Rights Program

Ms. Goldberg joined ISHR as program coordinator in September 2010 for the Darfur Development Initiative. As a conflict resolution, diversity and education program management specialist, she has coordinated various international study tour programs funded by the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Education and directed regional anti-bias and Holocaust education programming for the Anti-Defamation League. Since 2008, she has been instrumental in facilitating the strategic development of the U.S.-based Sudanese coalition, Voices for Sudan, as well as in leading a research initiative on the plight of Sudanese refugees in Israel, resulting in the report, "Voice for the Voiceless: Southern Sudanese Voice for Freedom Report on Sudanese Refugees in Israel.” As a 2009-2010 Atlas Service Corps Fellow in Bogota, Colombia, she served as Program Coordinator for the non-profit organization, Give to Colombia, channeling international resources to social development projects throughout the country. Most currently, she serves as an educational adviser to the United States Institute for Peace in construction of its new Global Center for Peace. She has published research on the role of women in peace building and on international intellectual property rights. Ms. Goldberg graduated from American University with a B.A. in International Relations and an M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Tiffany Wheatland 
Program Coordinator, Human Rights Advocates Program

Irene Atamian 
Business Manager

Ms. Atamian joined ISHR as its business manager in September 2006. Ms. Atamian exercises primary responsibility for ISHR’s administrative and programmatic budgets, as well as its personnel and instructional expenses, and for all grants and gift accounts. She received a Master of City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in August 2005. Prior to attending Cornell, she worked as an analyst at Nielsen Media Research. Ms. Atamian holds a Bachelor of Science in economics and finance from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Joe Kirchhof 
Assistant Program Officer

Mr. Kirchhof joined ISHR in February, 2007. He manages ISHR's student and public outreach and information systems. Mr. Kirchhof also supports many functions of the Human Rights Advocates Program and other ISHR capacity building initiatives. He holds a Bachelors in Cultural Studies and Political Science from the University of Minnesota and previously worked at Amnesty International in Chicago.

 

 
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