People: • Human Rights Staff • Human Rights Board • In Memoriam

Members of the Human Rights Program Board of Directors are appointed by the Provost. Board members meet quarterly and in committees to advise the Director and staff. Board members teach human rights courses and contribute their expertise in diverse disciplinary, thematic, and regional approaches to human rights to the development of curriculum and program.

Faculty Director Michael Geyer and Executive Director Susan Gzesh are responsible for leadership of the Human Rights Program, including teaching and advising students, supervising the internship program, and managing relations within the University and with funders and alumni.Assistant to the Director Sarah Patton Moberg is responsible for communications and day-to-day operations, including coordination of events and management of the student staff. The Internship Coordinator is responsible for the management of the Human Rights internship program. The Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow teaches courses, advises students on human rights research projects, and directs the Human Rights Workshop. The staff is assisted by a dynamic team of student employees who gain important experience in human rights education and organizing.

Human Rights Staff:

Michael Geyer, Faculty Director, Human Rights Program
Email Michael Geyer

Michael Geyer is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of Modern German and European History at the University of Chicago. He is one of the founding members of the Human Rights Program (1996) and became the Faculty Director of the program in 2008. His main concern is human rights education and training. Ever since the inception of the program he has been teaching one of the core surveys on the History and Theory of Human Rights, but he has also taught a variety of courses on humanitarianism and humanitarians, on war crimes and war crimes trials, on overcoming torture, and on the contemporary international human rights regime. He is particularly concerned with finding ways of melding liberal arts oriented rights education with human rights and humanitarian skills training and professional schooling. His research interests fall into three areas: an inquiry of the place of human rights in early constitutionalism; the question of humanitarianism and equality; and the contemporary conundrum of a surfeit of human rights law, nationally and internationally, and an actual lack of rights for individuals and people; the proliferation of humanitarian activism and the suspicion that it will not alleviate misery and provide succor.

Susan Gzesh, Executive Director, Human Rights Program
Susan Gzesh is Director of the Human Rights Program, a position she has held since August 2001. She is also a Senior Lecturer in the Center for International Studies and the College. She teaches courses on contemporary issues in human rights (including the prohibition on torture, women’s rights, and labor rights), the comparative human rights of aliens and citizens, human rights in Mexico and Latin America, and in the College Social Sciences core. Her research interests include the inter-relationship between human rights and migration policy, the history of U.S. immigration policy, and Mexico-U.S. relations. In addition to teaching, she directs a broad range of activities in the Human Rights Program including an internship program, public events, and a project on human rights curriculum in liberal arts education, funded by the Teagle Foundation. From 1996-2001 Susan Gzesh was Director of the Mexico-U.S. Advocates Network (now Enlaces America) and a founding member of the Regional Network of Civil Organizations for Migration, two innovative coalitions of civil society organizations from North America, Mexico, and Central America that advocate on human rights and migration policy with governments of the region. From 1997- 1999, Gzesh was the legal adviser to the Mexican Foreign Ministry on U.S. immigration law and policy. Prior to 1996, Gzesh practiced law in a variety of settings: in private practice, federally-funded legal services, and with the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. She was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universidad de Guadalajara in 1990 and served on the Clinton-Gore Transition Team for the Department of Justice in 1992. Her publications include America’s Human Rights Challenge, Migration Policy Institute, 2006, and "Mexico-U.S. Migration and Cross-Border Organizing," in David Brooks & Jonathan Fox, eds., Cross Border Dialogues: U.S.- Mexico Social Movement Networking, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD, 2002, as well as other short articles, op-ed pieces, and commentaries. She is a non-resident Fellow of the Migration Policy Institute, Washington, D.C. and serves on the faculty committees of the Center for Latin American Studies, Committee on International Relations, and the Advisory Committee of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division. She was appointed by Governor Rod Blagojevich to the Illinois New Americans Immigrant Policy Council and serves on the Chicago Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Board of Directors of Kartemquin Films. She is a consultant with various philanthropic foundations. Susan Gzesh received an A.B. from the University of Chicago in 1972 and a J.D. in 1977 from the University of Michigan. She is fluent in Spanish and is a legal commentator for Univision-TV, Chicago.
Email Susan Gzesh

Sarah Patton Moberg, Assistant to the Director
Sarah Patton Moberg became Assistant to the Director of the Human Rights Program in September 2007. She received her B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology from Carleton College in Northfield, MN in June 2007.
(773) 834-0957   E-mail Sarah Patton Moberg

Noa Vaisman, Human Rights Lecturer
Noa Vaisman received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the Anthropology Department at Cornell University. Her dissertation “Talk, Dreamwork, and Specters: (Re)Constructing Patterns of Truth, Self and Society in Present-Day Buenos Aires” explores the social, legal and political processes of post-dictatorial collective rebuilding among middle-class porteños (the inhabitants of the Buenos Aires). Based on over two and a half years of fieldwork this work looks at the patterns that connect processes of social reconstruction with middle class porteños’ ways of being-in-the-world and forms of interpreting events.
This year she will be teaching courses on human rights and anthropology, doctrines of mass-murder, and human rights and the new science. E-mail Noa Vaisman

Jacob (Jack) Lesniewski, Internship Coordinator
Jacob (Jack) Lesniewski is a doctoral student at the University's School of Social Service Administration. He and his wife Sarah served for four years with the Mennonite Central Committee in Guatemala as community development workers before coming to the University. He served as the Workers Center Network coordinator for Interfaith Worker Justice as a Human Rights Intern in 2008. Jacob has worked in violence prevention, for Chicago's community garden land trust, and as an organizer for various political, labor, and community campaigns in Chicago. He and Sarah are also resident heads in the University's undergraduate housing system. Jack is the proud and sometimes harried father of three budding human rights activists. E-mail Jack Lesniewski

Human Rights Program Faculty Board (2008-09)

Martha Nussbaum, Co-Chair-- Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, the Law School, Department of Philosophy, Divinity School and the College; Associate, Departments of Classical Languages and Literatures and Political Science; Affiliate, Committee on Southern Asian Studies; Coordinator, Center for Comparative Constitutionalism

John Schumann, Co-Chair --Assistant Professor of Medicine, General Internal Medicine Section, Primary Care Group

Mark Bradley, Associate Professor of International History and the College

Daniel Brudney, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College; Associate Faculty in the Divinity School; Associate Faculty, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Professor, Department of Anthropology and the College

Elizabeth Chandler, Director, Center for Teaching & Learning and the Midwest Faculty Seminar, the College

James Chandler, Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities; Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English, Committees on the History of Culture, Cinema & Media Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, and the College.

Bradin Cormack, Associate Professor, Department of English; Director, Nicholson Center for British Studies

Jane Dailey, Associate Professor of American History

Rosalind Dixon, Assistant Professor of Law

Norma Field, Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College

Michael Geyer, Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History, Department of History and the College

Tom Ginsburg, Professor of Law

Ramon Gutierrez, Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College

Judy Hoffman, Lecturer, Committee on Cinema & Media Studies and Department of Visual Arts

John Kelly, Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair

Emilio Kouri, Associate Professor, Department of History and the College; Director, Katz Center for Mexican Studies

Lyonette Louis-Jacques, Foreign and International Law Librarian, D'Angelo Law Library; Lecturer, the Law School

Jeanne Marsh, George Herbert Jones Professor and Dean, School of Social Service Administration

Marvin Makinen, Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the College

Jennifer Pitts, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, and the College

Moishe Postone, Professor, Department of History, the Committee on Jewish Studies and the College

Julie Saville, Associate Professor of History

Eric Slauter, Associate Professor, Department of English Language & Literature; Director, Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture

James Sparrow, Assistant Professor of U.S. History, Department of History and the College

Amy Dru Stanley, Associate Professor of History

Christine Stansell, Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College

In Memoriam:

Iris Marion Young, 1949-2006
Professor Iris Young, a leading philosopher called by a colleague “one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century,” died in her home Tuesday, Aug. 1 2006.

Professor Young was a member of the University of Chicago's Political Science Department since 2000, and an active member of the Human Rights Program Faculty Board.  Prof. Young was known for her deep commitment to social justice and grassroots political activity on causes such as women’s human rights, debt relief for Africa and workers’ rights.

Young’s books include Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (1997); Inclusion and Democracy (2000); and On Female Body Experience (2004). Before coming to the University of Chicago she taught political theory for nine years in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

Alan Gewirth, 1912-2004
Alan Gewirth was an internationally renowned scholar who made important contributions in several areas of philosophy, including medieval political philosophy, early modern philosophy, and ethics (especially the theory of rights). Professor Gewirth was born in Manhattan on November 28, 1912, and received  his A.B. in 1934 from Columbia University, where he was inspired to become a philosopher by Richard McKeon, the demanding Aristotelian scholar. After two years of graduate study at Columbia, he spent the academic year 1936-7 on a Sage Fellowship at Cornell University and was then brought to the University of Chicago as an assistant to the already illustrious McKeon, who had been invited there the year before by Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins. In June 1942, Professor Gewirth was drafted into the army, moving up the ranks from private to captain in four years. He spent the academic year 1946-47 at Columbia on the GI Bill, receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1948. From 1947 onward he was a regular member of the faculty at the University of Chicago. Among many other honors, Professor Gewirth served as president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Legal and Political Philosophy and was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His lifelong devotion to research continued unabated after his retirement in 1982: in 1996 he published The Community of Rights (University of Chicago Press) and in 1998, Self-Fulfillment (Princeton University Press), as well as numerous articles. In 1997, Professor Gewirth became a charter member of the board of the then newly constituted Human Rights Program, for which he developed and taught its primary course, Human Rights I: Philosophical Foundations, in which undergraduates, graduate students, and law and medical students were enrolled.

Read the official University press release about Professor Gewirth's death.

Robert Kirschner, 1940-2002
An internationally recognized authority on forensic pathology, human rights violations, police brutality, torture and child abuse and an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, Robert H. Kirschner, M.D., a clinical associate in the department of pathology and pediatrics and a founding member of the faculty board of the human rights program at the University of Chicago, died at the University of Chicago Hospitals on September 15, 2002.

More about Dr. Kirschner:

• Read "Bearing Witness for the Dead," a piece on Dr. Kirschner from the Winter 2001 issue of Medhunters.
• Read the release about Dr. Kirschner's death from the University News Office

• close Remarks by Rashid Khalidi at the memorial service for Dr. Kirschner Sept. 18, 2002, K.A.M. Isaiah Israel, Chicago, Illinois I never knew anyone like Bob Kirschner. I have known many people who had a vast knowledge of their field. I have known some compassionate people. I have known a couple of really modest people. And I have known a very few people with a true passion for justice. But I have never known anyone who combined these things in the extraordinary way that Bob did, or with the spectacular results he obtained. Bob was always completely dedicated to the pursuit of what was right. He was always completely dedicated to bringing out the truth. And he combined these driving passions, perhaps the most noble that can animate a human being, with a profound desire that these values be passed on. It was not enough for him that he exert himself to his utmost to see to it that the perpetrators of unspeakable evil be brought to justice. He not only felt it was essential that these evils be understood by others; beyond this, he committed himself to the training and education of people who could carry on this work. This was the root of his involvement with the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Bob was more than just one of the founders of this program, central through his role was in every aspect of the program’s activities. He was more than just the most experienced practitioner among us. Beyond this, he was both the patron saint and a father figure for our students, and especially for our human rights interns, whom we sent out to the four corners of the earth to work with human rights organizations investigating the kinds of abuses that Bob has become famous for uncovering. To our students, Bob was a guide to what could and could not be done safely, an expert on how to approach both theoretical and practical problems in human rights, and a touchstone of common sense about the logistics of doing human rights work abroad, or doing researching here in the United States. He was the person to whom they looked the most frequently when they needed expert advice. Because he was always approachable, low-key, friendly and full of humor, students found it easy to ask him for this advice, to draw on his vast reservoir of experience, and to obtain feedback on their ideas and projects. Bob’s presence, his expertise, and his enthusiasm were central to what we did with students in this program, and these idealistic, bright students were why he considered the program so important and gave it so much of his time and energy, even after illness began to limit both. In spite of illness, his determination and drive never flagged, however, and he continued to make the unique contributions to the program and to our students that he had always made. As you all know, Bob was a forensic pathologist, a man with scientific training, someone with investigative abilities and capacities of analysis that astonished even the most accomplished lawyers – I was speaking to a veteran lawyer just last week, and mentioned that I knew Bob, and she immediately started telling me with wonder in her voice about a case many years ago when Bob had helped her prove the innocence of an accused man via the most extraordinary employment of his many skills, including his experience as patholgist to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Yet this brilliant scientist, this trained doctor, also understood politics better than so many supposed experts. He could see right through the veil of cant, hypocrisy, and lies that obscure so much of what modern states do, because he had looked at their concrete actions, via autopsies and other investigations that revealed the true face of these governments. There can be no replacing a man like Bob Kirschner, neither in the field where he made his name, nor in the training and education of students in human rights. What he has seen and done were unique, and we who learned from him are all fortunate that we were able to partake in a small way in absorbing some of the lessons of his illustrious career. Many people associated with the University of Chicago have rightly won renown. But I doubt that many can point to achievements like Bob’s in seeing to it that justice and truth prevail. We cannot replace him, but we can try to emulate him, and to try to further the values he spent his entire life pursuing. I hope that we will come away from this sad gathering in his memory with a redoubled determination to do both of these things. close

  close A Life in Human Rights: A Memorial Symposium for Robert H. Kirschner, M.D. (1940-2002) Tuesday, April 22nd 2003 Download mp3 files by clicking on a speaker's name: Introduction: Rashid Khalidi, Center for International Studies, University of Chicago Susannah Sirkin, Physicians for Human Rights, Boston Father Jon Cortina, Universidad Centroamericana, El Salvador Professor Barbara Frey, Human Rights Program, University of Minnesota Professor Larry Marshall, Center on Wrongful Convictions, Northwestern University Professor Neve Gordon, Ben-Gurion University, Israel Sara Paretsky, Author Conclusion: Susan Gzesh / Barbrara Kirschner close

  Remarks by Rashid Khalidi at the memorial service for Dr. Kirschner - Sept. 18, 2002, K.A.M. Isaiah Israel, Chicago, Illinois
• Memorial Symposium, April 22nd, 2003: view poster or listen to speakers

Students, friends, and colleagues are invited to submit their reminiscences of Dr. Kirschner's impact on their work or interest in human rights for inclusion on the Human Rights Program website. Please e-mail your reminiscences to human-rights@uchicago.edu.