People: • Human Rights Staff • Human Rights Board • In Memoriam • Center for International Studies Staff

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.

Director Susan Gzesh is 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. Internship Coordinator of the Center for International Studies Shayna Plaut 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:

Susan Gzesh, 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.
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Shayna Plaut, Internship Coordinator, Center for International Studies
Shayna Plaut became the Internship Coordinator for the Center for International Studies (Human Rights Program and the Environmental Studies Program) in September 2007. She also designs and teaches human rights and media courses at Columbia College, Chicago. Shayna is an educator, researcher and activist and has worked with human rights issues domestically and internationally for over ten years. Shayna currently serves as the Amnesty International (AI) USA Balkans Regional Action (RAN) Coordinator and on AIUSA's Committee on Mission, Research and Action and is a member of the International Human Rights Education Consortium. In 2003 she received a University of Chicago Human Rights Program Internship and a Fulbright Scholarship to Macedonia where she focused on Romani media and social change. Shayna Plaut received her B.A. (Social and Global Studies/Political Science) from Antioch College and her M.A. (Humanities/Cultural Studies and Media Theory) from University of Chicago.
E-mail Shayna Plaut

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

Babafemi Akinrinade, Post-Doctoral Instructor, Human Rights Program
Babafemi Akinrinade holds the LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees in International Human Rights Law of the University of Notre Dame Law School, as well as the LL.B. and LL.M. degrees of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He was a fellow at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame Law School (2005-2006) and from 2003-2004, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow (and co-Instructor) for the Sawyer Seminar on Comparative Truth and Reconciliation Process at the Center for International Human Rights, Northwestern University Law School, Chicago. He was admitted to the Nigerian Bar in 1988, and between 1992 and 2002, he was a Lecturer in Law at the Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria (1992-2002). His research interests include state collapse and human rights, transitional justice, international humanitarian law, and the political, security and socio-economic relations of African States.
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Human Rights Board

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Professor, Anthropology
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, (PhD, University of Campinas 1975) Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, has dealt with indigenous Amazonian cultures, the re-emigration of freed slaves to West Africa in the nineteenth century and the history of Brazilian legislation and policy towards indigenous peoples from the 16th century to the present, focusing on ethnicity, history and myth. She has been much involved with indigenous rights in Brazil; she is presently conducting a multi-disciplinary pilot project in the Amazon on the sustainability of extractive reserves and on Amazonian ethnoscience.
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Douglass Cassel, Professor, Law School, Northwestern University (External Member)
Douglass Cassel is Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law, where he teaches and practices international human rights law. His current research interests include, among others, the International Criminal Court; universal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity; justice, peace and reconciliation in transitional and war-torn societies; the human rights responsibilities of multinational corporations; and the effect of economic globalization on human rights.
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Elizabeth Chandler, Director, Center for Teaching and Learning
Elizabeth Chandler has been designing teaching programs for over a decade at the University of Chicago. Drawing upon her own experience teaching European cultural history, she has directed the National Institutes on Issues in Teaching and Learning, the Midwest Faculty Seminar, the Chicago Teaching Program and the Summer Seminars.
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James Chandler, Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities
James Chandler is Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Professor of English and is a faculty member in the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, Committee on General Studies, Committee on the History of Culture, and the College.
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Norma Field, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Norma Field's teaching and research includes a focus on Modern Japanese literature with an interest in the dialectical pursuit of structural and historical analyses, "naïve" and "scholarly" responses; translation as interpretive, creative, and scholarly activity; feminism; all of the above in the context of contemporary capitalism.
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Michael Geyer, Professor, History
Michael Geyer works as a military historian with topics ranging from research on ethnic war in World War I, genocide in World War II, and electronic and information warfare.  His second area of interest is German and European History in the twentieth century. Together with Konrad Jarausch (at Potsdam and Chapel Hill) he is working on a book-length essay on twentieth-century German history, "The Shattered Past," and has just completed editing a volume on "The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany."  He is increasingly concerned with thinking through the questions "What is Europe? What is European modernity?" on the one hand and with what he considers one of the key challenges of modern Germany on the other -- how to understand and write about dying, rites of passage and mourning in the shadow of terror, war and genocide. His third main area of interest is world history and, particularly, the history of globalization during the long twentieth century. He occasionally writes on the theory of history with a particular interest in the effects of information-systems.
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Emilio Kouri, Associate Professor, History
Emilio Kourí's main scholarly interest is in the social and economic history of rural Mexico since Independence. He is the author of A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2004). It tells the story of the strife-ridden transformation of rural social relations in the Totonac region of Papantla during the course of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how the progressive development of a campesino-based international vanilla economy changed and ultimately undermined local forms of communal landholding. His current research project is an examination of the idea of the “Indian pueblo” in 19th and 20th century Mexican thought, law, and political discourse. He teaches seminars on land reforms, rural social movements, and the history of agrarian thought, as well as courses on Latin American and Latino history, and is Director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies.
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Lyonette Louis-Jacques, Foreign and International Law Librarian and Lecturer in Law D'Angelo Law Library, University of Chicago Law School
Ms. Louis-Jacques’ current research interests include use of the Internet by law faculty, students, and librarians worldwide, and techniques for teaching FCIL research. She has written articles and lectured on researching human rights law, international trade law, sources on careers in international law, finding legal resources on the Internet, and the virtual law library. One of her most recent publication is "Gaps in International Legal Literature," in the Chicago Journal of International Law. Ms. Louis-Jacques is a member of the American Association of Law Libraries (including service as chair of the AALL Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Special Interest Section, 1994-95, and the Computing Services Special Interest Section, 1999-2000, and member of the Advisory Committee on the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, the International Association of Law Libraries (http://iall.org/), the American Society of International Law, and several other national and international law and library associations. She is a member of the Illinois Bar and on the Board of the University of Chicago Human Rights Program and the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center.
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Marvin Makinen, Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Marvin Makinen has been a member of the faculty at The University of Chicago since 1974 and is a founding member of the Human Rights Board. He is presently Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and has served as chairman of the department from 1988 to 1993. His primary research interests in molecular biophysics and biochemistry are in mechanisms of enzymes and the structural basis of enzyme action. Since 1990 Professor Makinen has worked on three international committees as a consultant to the Swedish Foreign Ministry regarding the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, who, sent to Budapest as a diplomat in July, 1944, is credited with having saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from annihilation.
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William Novak, Associate Professor, History
Bill Novak joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1991 after receiving his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization Program at Brandeis University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Novak works in the fields of United States legal and political history, with special emphasis on issues of liberalism, state-building, and public law. His first book, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Winner of the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize) used nineteenth-century state court records to document the long history of governmental activism in the United States. He is currently working on a second book on the history of The State in America. He regularly offers courses on American Legal History, The History of the State, Law and Social Theory, and Human Rights.
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Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, The Law School
Martha Nussbaum received her B.A. from NYU and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities. From 1986 to 1993, Ms. Nussbaum was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She has chaired the Committee on International Cooperation and the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association, and has been a member of the Association's National Board. In 1999-2000 she was one of the three Presidents of the Association, delivering the Presidential Address in the Central Division. Ms. Nussbaum has been a member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. Professor Nussbaum is appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School and Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department, an Affiliate of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She is the founder and Coordinator of the new Center for Comparative Constitutionalism.
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Moishe Postone, Associate Professor, History
Moishe Postone's research and teaching focus on 19th and 20th century European intellectual history, with emphasis on critical social theories. He is particularly interested in self-reflexive theories of historical context--theories that seek to grasp social, economic, and cultural processes in ways that illuminate the relation of such processes to the theories themselves. His work also focuses on the problematic of modern anti-Semitism and questions of history, memory, and identity in postwar Germany, as well as on the issue of the global transformations of the past three decades and their implications for understanding the historical trajectory of the 20th century.
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John Schumann, Assistant Professor of Medicine, General Internal Medicine
Dr. Schumann earned his undergraduate degree at Yale University before earning his Medical Degree at Case Western University. He went on to perform his residency and Cambridge Hospital. Dr. Schumann is interested in the use and interpretation of clinical guidelines in physician practice. He is also involved in issues related to health and human rights.
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Adele Simmons (External Member)
Adele Simmons served as President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1989 to 1999. Among her many accomplishments, she helped shape MacArthur's Program on Global Security, which supports efforts to better understand the complex strategies necessary to reduce conflict and promote security in the broadest sense.

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.