Speakers

Ali Abunimah

Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (Nation Books). He has contributed to several other books and written hundreds of articles on the question of Palestine in a wide array of publications, including The Jordan Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and Al Jazeera.

Professor Susan Akram

Susan Akram is Clinical Professor at Boston University School of Law, teaching immigration law, comparative refugee law, and international human rights law and supervising students handling refugee and asylum cases in BU’s Asylum and Human Rights program. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (B.A), Georgetown University Law Center, Washington DC (JD), and the Institut International des Droits del ‘Homme, Strasbourg (diplome in international human rights). Before joining the faculty at BUSL in 1993, Susan Akram was executive director of Boston’s Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project and before that, directing attorney of the immigration project at the public interest law firm of Public Counsel in Los Angeles. She is a past Fulbright Senior Scholar in Palestine, teaching at Al-Quds University/Palestine School of Law in East Jerusalem, and researching on durable solutions for Palestinian refugees. She was also interim director of the program for resettling Iraqi refugees from the camps in Saudi Arabia after the First Gulf War. She has spoken and published widely in the fields of immigration law, refugee law and human rights.

Sa’ed Atshan

Sa’ed Atshan is a joint PhD candidate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University where he is a Soros Fellow, National Science Foundation Fellow, and Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He received an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2008. Mr. Atshan received his BA from Swarthmore College in 2006 and he completed high school at the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker institution which has been in Palestine for over a century. He has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commission on Refugees, Human Rights Watch, Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the Government of Dubai. He is also a Lecturer in Peace and Justice Studies at Tufts University. Sa’ed was born to a Palestinian refugee family and was raised in the Occupied Territories.

Dr. Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Naor Ben-Yehoyada is a Visiting Lecturer and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, Director of Undergraduate Programs at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and a Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He studies the historical anthropology of region formation in the Mediterranean, specifically between Sicily and Tunisia and in the Levant in the 20th century. In his dissertation, Mediterranean, Becoming and Unbecoming: Fishing, Smuggling, and Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II, as well as in his published articles, he examines the political economy and the cultural processes that maritime region formation entails. His publications include “The Moral Perils of Mediterraneanism: Second Generation Immigrants Practicing Personhood between Sicily and Tunisia,” in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and “The Reluctant Seafarers: Fishing, self-acculturation, and the stumbling Zionist colonization of the Palestine Coast in the Interbellum Period,” forthcoming in Jewish Culture and History. Naor will teach the course Mediterranean Becoming: Historical Anthropology of North Africa and Southern Europe in fall 2011, and Conflict and Coexistence: Historical Anthropology of Israel/Palestine and a seminar on Political Economy in the spring.

Dr. Dalit Baum

Dr. Dalit Baum is a feminist teacher and activist in Israel and co-founder of Who Profits from the Occupation, an activist research initiative of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel. During the last five years, "Who Profits" has become a vital resource for dozens of campaigns around the world, providing information about corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine. This year, she is working out of San Francisco as the regional program coordinator of the Middle East program of AFSC - the American Friends Service Committee, and with the Economic Activism for Palestine Program of Global Exchange, which aims to support corporate accountability campaigns in the U.S. with research, training and networking.

Assistant Professor Amahl Bishara

Assistant Professor Amahl Bishara teaches anthropology at Tufts University. She is currently examining the production of US news in the West Bank by way of ethnography. Some of her recent publications include, Palestinian Christian Networked Activism: Reifying "Nonviolence" or Divining Justice? (The Review of Middle East Studies, 2010), Culture Concepts in Political Struggle (co-written with Jessica Winegar for The Review of Middle East Studies, 2010), and New Media and Political Change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Assembling Media Worlds and Cultivating Networks of Care (The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2010).

Diana Buttu

Diana Buttu is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and former spokesperson with the Negotiations Support Unit of the Palestine Liberation Organization. She has worked as a legal adviser and negotiator on peace negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian organizations and has appeared numerous times on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.

Ms. Buttu received a B.A. in Middle East and Islamic Studies and an LL.M. from the University of Toronto, a J.D. from Queen's University Faculty of Law, a J.S.M. from Stanford Law School, and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She is currently a fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center and an Eleanor Roosevelt visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

Professor Marc Ellis

Professor Marc Ellis teaches Jewish Studies at Baylor University. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in Religion and American Studies at Florida State University, where he studied under the Holocaust theologian Richard Rubenstein, and the American historian of the Catholic Worker movement, William Miller. He received his doctorate in History from Marquette University in 1980 where he was inducted into Phi Alpha Theta and the Jesuit Honor Society. Upon graduation he accepted a faculty position at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Maryknoll, New York, becoming founding director of their M.A. program and the Maryknoll Institute for Justice and Peace.

Professor Ellis was made full professor in 1988, and remained at Maryknoll until 1995, when he assumed a position first as a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, and then as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as well as a visiting professorship at Florida State University. Professor Ellis is University Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of History, and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, where he first arrived in 1998.

Professor Ellis has authored and edited more than twenty books. Professor Ellis' latest book Encountering the Jewish Future: Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, was published in the Fall of 2011.

Associate Professor Leila Farsakh

Leila Farsakh is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, (Routledge, fall 2005) and editor of Commemorating the Naksa, Evoking the Nakba, (a special volume of Electronic Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, in Spring 2008), as well as several articles on the political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on the One-State solution. Dr. Farsakh holds a Ph.D. from the University of London and an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge, UK. She has worked with a number of international organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris and has been a senior research fellow at the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University, in the West Bank since 2008. In 2001 Dr. Farsakh won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission, in Cambridge-Massachusetts.

Professor Emerita Elaine Hagopian

Professor Emerita Elaine Hagopian held faculty appointments in Sociology at Smith College and Simmons College. She was also a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut and a Distinguished Lectureship at the American University in Cairo. She served as a special consultant to UNICEF in the United Arab Emirates and as a UNESCO Expert on a team to conduct a feasibility study throughout the Middle East for a Palestine Open University to serve Palestinian refugees.

Professor Hagopian also received two Fulbright Hayes Faculty Research Grants to conduct research on Palestine and Arab Nationalism and to research the French period in Lebanon at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. She is the Editor or Co-Editor/Author of Arab Americans: Studies in Assimilation; the award winning Civil Rights in Peril: the Targeting of Arabs and Muslims; South Lebanon; The Realignment of Power in Lebanon: External and Internal Dimensions (special issue of the Arab Studies Quarterly). She has also authored some 100 articles and book reviews.

Professor Duncan Kennedy

Professor Duncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School. Kennedy received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1964 and an LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1970. After completing a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Kennedy joined the Harvard Law School faculty, becoming a full professor in 1976. In March 2010 he received an Honoris Causa Ph.D. title from the University of Los Andes (Colombia).

His research interests include Law and Third World Economic Development, Left Wing Law and Economics, and Legal History. He is a founding member of the Critical Legal Studies movement.

Itamar Mann

Itamar Mann is a scholar and practitioner of human rights. His recent scholarship includes The Dual Foundation of Universal Jurisdiction and The Necessity Procedure: Laws of Torture in Israel and Beyond, 1987 – 2009 (with Omer Shatz). He occasionally contributes op-eds for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

In 2010 - 2011, Mr. Mann was awarded Yale Law School’s Bernstein Fellowship for Human Rights. During the fellowship he served as consultant for the Open Society Justice Initiative, and wrote The EU’s Dirty Hands, a Human Rights Watch report spotlighting the complicity of European Union border guards with inhumane treatment of migrants. His current research examines the legal structure of transnational border enforcement in the US, EU and Australia.

Before coming to Yale Law School, Mr. Mann studied law and philosophy in the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students in Tel Aviv-University. In the philosophy department, he taught a mandatory critical reading course for sophomores. He also practiced law, including in the Supreme Court of Israel. His cases challenged due process violations in security-related procedures, deportations, and administrative detention. He co-founded an Israeli NGO called Anu Plitim (“We Refugees”), providing pro-bono representation for asylum seekers. Mr. Mann speaks English, Hebrew, Arabic and French.

Professor Timothy McCarthy

Professor Timothy McCarthy is Lecturer on History and Literature, Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy, and Director the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program (formerly the Human Rights and Social Movements Program) at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He also teaches in the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

An historian of social movements, Dr. McCarthy graduated with honors from Harvard College and received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, where he completed his dissertation under the direction of Eric Foner. Dr. McCarthy's research agenda focuses on the relationship between human rights and social movements in three main areas: race relations and civil rights; LGBT politics, policy, and advocacy; and modern-day slavery and human trafficking.

At the Carr Center, he runs a biweekly study group on Human Rights and Social Movements, and co-chairs, with Christina Bain, the Regional Working Group on Modern-Day Slavery and Human Trafficking. He has published two books, The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (New Press, 2003) and Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New Press, 2006), and his third book, Protest Nation: The Radical Roots of Modern America, is forthcoming from the New Press in 2010. He is also currently at work on several other book projects.

His essays and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, Journal of American History, In These Times, Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Souls, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Folha, and The Nation, and he is a regular contributor to radio, web, and other media outlets.

Professor Ilan Pappé

Professor Ilan Pappé teaches at history at the University of Exeter. He obtained his BA degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1979 and the D. Phil from the University of Oxford in 1984.

Professor Pappé founded and directed the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel between 1992 to 2000 and was the Chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestine Studies in Haifa between 2000 and 2006. He was a senior lecturer in the department of Middle Eastern History and the Department of Political Science in Haifa University, Israel between 1984 and 2006. Professor Pappé was also appointed as chair in the department of History in the Cornwall Campus, 2007-2009 and became a fellow of the IAIS in 2010.

His research focuses on the modern Middle East and in particular the history of Israel and Palestine. He has also written on multiculturalism, Critical Discourse Analysis and on Power and Knowledge in general.

Professor Pappé has written a number of books including A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London and New York: Oneworld, 2006).

Rabbi Brant Rosen

Rabbi Brant Rosen serves a congregation in Evanston, IL. He currently serves as the co-chair of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council and is a member of the American Friends of Tent of Nations North America Advisory Board. He is also Past President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and the has served on the board of Rabbis for Human Rights - North America. Rabbi Rosen's writings appear regularly in his popular blog, "Shalom Rav" and he has also contributed to the editorial pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Huffington Post, among others.

Rabbi Rosen is the recipient of numerous awards, including the "Partner in Justice Award" from Avodah Jewish Service Corps and the "Inspiration for Hope Award" from the American Friends Service Committee. In 2008, Rabbi Rosen was honored by Newsweek magazine as one of the Top 25 Pulpit Rabbis in America.

Professor Nadim Rouhana

Nadim N. Rouhana is Professor of International Negotiation and Conflict Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Prior to joining Tufts University, he was a Chair Professor of Conflict Studies at George Mason University. He held various academic positions at Palestinian, Israeli, and American universities. From 1984 to 1986, he taught at al-Najah National University in the West Bank, where he served as the Dean of Social Research. He then pursued postdoctoral work at Harvard University and taught at Harvard University and Boston College. He was a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs from 1992 to 2001 where he chaired the Center’s Seminar on International Conflict. From 2001 to 2004, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

Rouhana is the founding director of Mada al-Carmel—Arab Center for Applied Social Research (Haifa), which examines the relationship between the Jewish and Palestinian communities in the area of historic Palestine with a special focus on identity, citizenship, and democracy. In particular, Mada examines the impact of Israel’s ethnic identity on the relationship with its Palestinians citizens and the dynamics of its conflict with the Palestinian people.

His publications include Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (Yale University Press, 1997) and numerous academic articles on collective identity, multiethnic states, dynamics of asymmetric conflicts, reconciliation, and Palestinian and Israeli societies.

Professor Sarah Schulman

Professor Sarah Shulman is a novelist, playwright, journalist, and professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island). Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for her ”Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies” from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, a Guggenheim Fellowship (Playwrighting), Fulbright (Judaic Studies), 2 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Fiction, 1 NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Playwrighting, Stonewall Award for Improving the Lives of Gays and Lesbians in the United States, 6 residencies at MacDowell, 3 residencies at Yaddo, Revson Fellow for the Future of New York City at Columbia University, 2 American Library Association Book Awards (Fiction and Nonfiction), Finalist Prix de Rome in Fiction.

Professor Schulman is on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace and is a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. She is the author of countless books and articles, including a groundbreaking New York Times op-ed on the “pinkwashing” of Israeli human rights abuses.

Associate Professor Heike Schotten

Heike Schotten is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Author of Nietzsche’s Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality (Palgrave, 2009), her research interests lie at the unlikely intersection of Nietzsche studies and queer theory, where she attempts to construct a theory of radical political transformation that does not fall prey to the pitfalls of modernity’s seductive but inevitably disappointing revolutionary desire. Prof. Schotten has been a consistent Palestine solidarity activist since 2006 and continually seeks to put philosophy and political theory into critical discussion with political events, a connection made with regard to Palestine/Israel in her forthcoming article, “Reading Nietzsche in the Wake of the 2008-09 War on Gaza” (Philosophy in the Contemporary World, Spring 2012).

Professor Eve Spangler

Professor Eve Spangler teaches at Boston College. Her main interests lie in the intersecting areas of work and inequality. Professor Spangler’s current research focuses on occupational health and safety, particularly for women workers. This is a topic in which several themes converge: the Left's concern with the organization of production, women's stake in controlling their lives, and the public's concern with environmental health. In a global economy, interest in worker health and safety is inherently international and has led Professor Spangler to do research, to organize cross-national exchanges and to do curriculum planning in Eastern Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and South Africa.

Securing safe and healthy workplaces is also requires intersectoral collaboration, and so Professor Spangler chairs the Leadership for Change program - a certificate program offered jointly by the Sociology Department and the Carroll School of Management, designed to promote socially responsible business practices. She also serves as Board member to the Human and Civil Rights Organizations of America and maintains Visiting Scholar ties to the Harvard School of Public Health.

Nimer Sultany

Nimer Sultany is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School. He has law degrees from the College of Management (LL.B.), Tel Aviv University (LL.M.), and the University of Virginia (LL.M.). His doctoral work focuses on contemporary progressive constitutional and political theory.

Mr. Sultany has worked for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research. His publications include: Citizens without Citizenship: Israel and the Palestinian Minority (Mada, 2003); The Legacy of Justice Aharon Barak: A Critical Review (Harvard International Law Journal Online); Redrawing the Boundaries of Citizenship: Israel’s New Hegemony (Journal of Palestine Studies); and The State of Progressive Constitutional Theory: The Paradox of Constitutional Democracy and the Project of Political Justification (forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review). His op-eds have been published in The Guardian, the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, Haaretz, Arabs48 website, and al-Quds al-Arabi.

Professor Stephen M. Walt

Professor Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professsor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.

Professor Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007).