Participants

Dr. Ambreen Agha was awarded the degree of Ph.D. by the Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, for her ethnographic study of the women active in Islamic Revivalist Movement of Tablighi Jamaát.  She is associated with the South Asia Terrorism Portal for the last six years as a Researcher and has extensively written on extremism and religious violence in Pakistan. Her larger interest area is Comparative Religion and various religious orientations that assert themselves, in both violent and non-violent forms.

Dr Zehra Aziz-Beyli was born in 1978 and grew up in Nicosia, Cyprus. She earned a Bachelors degree in International Relations from Bilkent University in Turkey and a Masters degree in Global Security from Keele University in England. She completed her PhD at Keele University in 2014. Her doctoral research dealt with practices of commemoration in general and the culture of commemoration in Cyprus in particular. She is interested in politics of memory and how cultural memory works in societies. She has held posts as a lecturer at Eastern Mediterranean University, Lefke University and Cyprus International University in Cyprus and held tutorials at Keele University in England. She also took part in bi-communal projects both at POST RI and AHDR. She is holding the position of Financial Coordinator at POST RI since 2011. Growing up in a divided Cyprus, she feels the urgency to reach to a “culture of peace” in Cyprus. She is interested in culture of peace as a means to promote understanding and tolerance among the peoples of Cyprus and to strengthen dialogue among civilizations. She believes that it will be possible to achieve “a culture of peace” with the project of “Education for a Culture of Peace”, so that we all can make a difference!

Professor Samik Bandyopadhyay is an eminent critic of Indian art, theatre and film and currently Tagore Fellow in the School of Art & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He started his career as a lecturer at Rabindra Bharati University in 1966. In 1973, he joined the Oxford University Press as an editor and worked there till 1982. He resigned and never sought an employment because no job was lucrative enough for buying the books he wanted to read. He took up tutoring English literature for his profession, which enriched his reading as well as brushed his critical edge. He continued book editing, however, with Seagull Books, till 1988, and then with Thema Publishing. In 1993, his book Antonio Gramsci Nirbachita Rachansamagra was published in Kolkata.

Diane Barbeler (MAppSc Organisation Dynamics) is an Australian consultant with extensive experience managing large infrastructure projects and working on community development for the not-for-profit sector as a strategic planner, board member and advocate.  With her husband, Christopher Snedden, she has conducted research across South Asia into aspects of the Kashmir dispute, including conducting face-to-face interviews with victims of violence in Jammu in 1947 and travelling to both sides of the Line of Control dividing Jammu and Kashmir.  The knowledge gained has allowed Diane to edit all her husband’s academic work and to co-write their new book Crossing Imagined Lines.

 

Dr Ravi P Bhatia is an independent educationist and peace researcher. He has been a student, a teacher and senior administrator of Delhi University from where he has superannuated. Trained in USA he has taught and worked in several institutions.  He works in the areas of Gandhian Studies, Higher education, human rights and environmental issues. He is  a council member of International Peace Research Association and a GB Member of a Delhi University College. Since Dr Bhatia’s family belonged to Lahore, he has a keen interest in partition issues. He participates in conferences and has many articles to his credit  and has edited a book Religious Plurality, Gandhian Thought and Environmental Issues. He speaks several languages -- Punjabi, Sindhi, French in addition to Hindi and English.

Dr. Anuradha Bhattacharjee is an alumna of the London School of Economics (Economic History) and an ICSSR Fellow.  Her Ph.D. dissertation ‘Polish Refugees in India 1942–48’, was awarded the  Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship (2004) and subsequently the Bendre Prize for Best Dissertation by the University of Pune, 2006. It was published under the title The Second Homeland: Polish Refugees in India (Sage, 2012). The work has been translated into Polish and commissioned as a documentary film. She has been a post-doctoral research fellow at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) and the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and a Visiting Professor at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, China, and Assistant Professor at Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmedabad (MICA).  She has expertise in Economics, History and Media.

Professor Derek Charles Catsam is Professor of History and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. He is the author of Freedom’s Main Line: the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, (2009, paper 2011), Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup (2014) and Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season (2005). He is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on the 1981 South African national rugby team’s tour to the United States.

Dr Subarno Chattarji is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi. He has also taught in Japan and the UK. He has a B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. in English literature from the University of Delhi and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His publications include: Reconsidering English Studies in Indian Higher Education (Co-author, Routledge, 2015); Tracking the media: interpretations of mass media discourses in India and Pakistan (Routledge, 2008); Memories of a Lost War: American poetic responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2001). He is co-editor of The Hoot Reader: Media Practice in Twenty-First Century India (Oxford University Press, 2013), Globalization in India: Contents and Discontents (Pearson Education, 2009), and An Anthology of Indian Prose Writings in English (Penguin, 2004).

Asya Darbinyan is a PhD candidate at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her dissertation, directed by Prof. Taner Akçam, explores the Russian response to the Armenian Genocide, focusing on the condition and the treatment of the Armenian refugees during WWI. Previously, Darbinyan worked at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan, first as a senior research fellow, and later as the Deputy Director of the museum (2008-2013). She was awarded a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Fellowship at Shoah Memorial, Paris (spring 2013), and a Carnegie Research Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles (fall semester, 2011-12). Darbinyan received her B.A. (2007) and M.A. (2009) in International Relations from Yerevan State University.

Karel Fracapane is Senior Officer at the Education Sector of UNESCO where he is in charge of Holocaust and genocide issues. Fracapane previously served as Policy Officer at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as Executive Secretary of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (now the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), and as the Head of International Relations for the Shoah Memorial in Paris.

Dr Krista Hegburg is a Program Officer in the University Programs Division of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  She runs the Mandel Center’s Summer Research Workshop program and outreach programming for scholars from the Global South whose research focuses on, or intersects with, Holocaust studies. Dr. Hegburg’s research focuses on reparations politics and the Romani Holocaust in the Czech Republic. She has taught in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers  University, and currently teaches for the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, Poland. Dr. Hegburg earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.

Dr Peter Honeyman is a physician with long standing interest in the public health of remote Australian aboriginal communities. He is a senior research fellow in the School of Public Health, Dept of Rural Health at Sydney University, and attached to the Jerusalem Centre for Genocide Prevention (JC4GP) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. JC4PC uses epidemiological tools to add understanding and promote prevention of population destructions.

 

Dr Arpad Hornjak is an Associate Professor in the Institute of History at the University of Pecs, a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of History in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Lecturer at Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Diplomatic Relationship between Hungary and Yugoslavia (1918-1927). His research interests are focused on Hungarian – Yugoslav relations in the 20^th century and the Balkans in the 19^th and the 20^th century.

Mari Hovhannisyan has an MA in Political Science from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). She received her B.A in Journalism from Yerevan State University (Yerevan, Armenia). Mari Hovhannisyan was a researcher at the Department of Comparative Genocide Studies of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. Hovhannisyan, as a Carnegie Research Fellow, held a four-month research fellowship at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Mari authored the book “Collision of Past and Present: The Collective Memory of the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial” (Germany, 2012). Mari Hovhannisyan has intensively written on genocide denial. Hovhannisyan is a co-founder of the “Lazaryan Scientific and Educational Institute” NGO.

Dr. Dennis B. Klein is Kean University Professor of History and director of the Jewish Studies Program and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is author or editor of five books, including Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (University of Chicago Press, 1985), Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (Little, Brown in cooperation with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1997), The Genocidal Mind (Paragon, 2005), and The Second Liberation: Moral Survival After Atrocity (forthcoming, Rowman & Littlefield). He is founding editor in chief of Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies and founding director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Braun Center for Holocaust Studies. He is a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa, and recipient of numerous research awards. Dr. Klein is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities, Dictionary of International Biography, and Directory of American Scholars. In 2006 he was a Research Fellow at the University College London and Resident Fellow at Oxford University. He was appointed a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2014. His current work on post-atrocity testimonies and forgiveness theory is anthologized in Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness (Cambridge Scholars Press), the 10^th anniversary Truth and Reconciliation Commission conference volume, and Jean Améry and the Philosophy of Torture (Lexington Books). He guest-edited a special issue of Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques on witnesses’ accounts of violence and violations.

Dr. Adam Knowles is an Assistant Teaching Professor of philosophy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. He holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research and a Magister Artium from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. His specializes in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing on the political and ethical structures of philosophical discourse, especially in the work Martin Heidegger. Currently he is translating the fourth volume of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks for Indiana University Press and is preparing a book manuscript entitled Heidegger’s Voices: Pedagogy, Politics, Philosophy and Nazism. 

Dr. Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra worked at the Central University of Punjab, University of Mumbai and University of Jammu, India, from 2005 to 2012, after receiving a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was a recipient of the Scholar of Peace Award (New Delhi) in 2007 and Kodikara Award (Colombo) in 2010 and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Conflict Research, Belfast, UK in November 2008, a Charles Wallace India Fellow at Queen's University Belfast from March-April 2010 and a ICSSR Fellow in Moscow in September 2010. Dr. Mahapatra has published extensively on the issues related to international relations. His recent publications include Conflict and Peace in Eurasia (editor, Routledge, 2013) and Making Kashmir Borderless (RCSS, Colombo, 2013). He is currently associated with University of Massachusetts Boston, USA.

Dr Sramana Majumdar is Senior Research Associate at the Jindal Institute of Behavioral Sciences, OP Jindal Global University. She completed her PhD from the Department of Psychology, Jamia Millia Islamia where she worked on exposure to political conflict, collective violence and youth in Kashmir. She has also been interested in looking at gendered aspects of exposure to violence, collective memory, intergroup reconciliation and the role of identity in protracted conflict. A Fulbright- Nehru Doctoral Fellow and a UGC Senior Research Fellow, she has headed the research team at Outline India, a Research start up based out of Gurgaon, on national and international projects related to education, health and sanitation, across states in India. She was also a part of the UGC and United Kingdom Indian Education and Research Initiative team that has been working on Intergroup Contact and Collective Action in Educational settings in India. She was selected as the only representative from India to participate in the Advanced Research Training Seminar on Community Psychology, held as part of the International Congress of Psychology in South Africa, 2012.

Dr. Md. Nurul Momen is Associate Professor at the Department of Public Administration, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. He has a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) from the University of Bergen (Norway) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Sant Anna School of Advanced Studies (Italy). Nurul Momen’s main area of interest includes Public Policy and Law, Governance, and Public Sector Reform in South Asia. He has participated many international workshops and conferences and contributed to scholarly journals.

Tali Nates, Director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, has lectured internationally about Holocaust education, genocide prevention, reconciliation and human rights. She has presented at numerous conferences, published many articles and was involved in documentary films made for South African Television. In 2010, Ms. Nates was chosen as one of the top 100 newsworthy and noteworthy women in South Africa, published in the Mail & Guardian Book of South African Women. Ms. Nates acts as a scholar and leader of many Holocaust education missions to Eastern Europe as well as educational missions in South Africa and Rwanda. She is also one of the founders of ‘Holocaust Survivors Services’ in Johannesburg, an organization that offers social, educational and psychological services for survivors and their families. She comes from a family of Holocaust survivors-- her father and uncle were both saved by Oskar Schindler, but the rest of the family perished.

Professor David Patterson holds the Hillel A. Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies in the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.  A winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Koret Jewish Book Award, he has published more than 35 books and more than 200 articles, essays, and book chapters.  His most recent books include The Holocaust and the Non-Representable (forthcoming), Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins (2015); Genocide in Jewish Thought (2012); A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad (2011); and Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (2008).

Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a lecturer in Language Education at the Hebrew University and David Yellin Academic College, Jerusalem Israel and recipient of the Sakharov Prize for human rights and the freedom of thought, awarded to her by the European Parliament in 2001. She is the author of Palestine in Israeli school books. Ideology and propaganda in education, I.B. Tauris, London, 2012. She translates literary works from French and English into Hebrew. Her research interests focus on social semiotics and multimodality: the analysis of school books, multiculturalism and racist discourse in education, scientific discourse and the teaching of science, literacy in first and second language.  

 

Dr Dan Porat is a historian in the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently working on a book entitled State of Suspicion: Holocaust Survivors Charged as Nazi Collaborators in Israel that focuses on forty unknown trials against Jewish Nazi collaborators that took place in Israel between 1950 and 1972. He previously published a book The Boy: A Holocaust Story (New York: FSG/Hill & Wang), 2010) that focuses on the story behind the iconic photo of a little boy in Warsaw ghetto. He has also published several articles in the field of history and education.

Md. Muddassir Quamar is a doctoral candidate in Centre for West Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His thesis examines contemporary Saudi society within an Islamic-modernist perspective. He was a Visiting Fellow in King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh between November 2014 and February 2015. Quamar has co-edited an anthology Contemporary Persian Gulf: Essays in Honour of Gulshan Dietl, Prakash C. Jain and Girijesh Pant (New Delhi: Knowledge World, 2015), published research articles in national and international journals and contributed chapters in anthologies focusing on various aspects of societies in the Middle East and Gulf. He serves as Associate Editor of Contemporary Review of the Middle East, a refereed quarterly published by Sage (India).

Anubhav Roy is a Research Analyst for Ambassador Hardeep S. Puri (Retd.), India’s former Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He also edits for the online journal, E-International Relations. Previously, he was affiliated to the United Service Institution of India, after studying International Relations at the South Asian University. 

Prof. Elihu D. Richter MD MPH is head of the Genocide Prevention Program and Injury Prevention Center and Director of the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention. He is the retired head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and the Injury Prevention Center at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine. In recent years he has been working on epidemiologic models for prediction and prevention of genocide, mass atrocities and terror, with specific emphasis on the cause-effect relationship between hate language and incitement and these outcomes.

Professor Suzanne D. Rutland (OAM, MA (Hons) PhD, Dip Ed) is Professor Emerita in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical & Jewish Studies, University of Sydney. She has published widely on Australian Jewish history, including Jewish migration and Jewish women in Australia, as well as writing on the Holocaust, Israel and Jewish education. In 2005 she published The Jews in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She received a government grant from the Australian Prime Ministers Centre for research on Australia and the campaign for Soviet Jewry. In 2015 she published the book on this topic with Australian Jewish journalist, Sam Lipski, entitled Let My People Go: The Untold Story of Australia and Soviet Jews, 1959-1989 (Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers). In 2008 she received the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to Higher Jewish Education and interfaith dialogue.

Dr. Dhrubajyoti Sarkar teaches at the Department of English, University of Kalyani, West Bengal. His doctoral dissertation at University of Hyderabad was on authority in social reform movements of Bengal. His research interest includes religious nationalism and religion-culture interface in South and South East Asia. He teaches canonical British literature; in particular, the development of non-fictional prose with reference to the history of ideas in the Anglophone world. His sporadic research publications do not indicate his love and penchant to travel to places to listen silently to human voices and stories.

Raghunatha Sethupathy was born in Madurai, TamilNadu and presently lives in New Delhi. He did his Bachelors of Engineering (Mechanical Department) from KCG College of Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu and finished his law from the Campus Law Centre, Delhi University. Currently he practices in the Supreme Court of India, India. During his college, he was the Convener of the Debate and Discussion Society, Campus Law Centre, Delhi University and has authored and presented many papers in various colleges of India.

Dr. Ran Shauli is as a research fellow at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches courses on Collective Memory, the Chinese Diaspora and Southeast Asia at Bar-Ilan University. His doctoral research dealt with the history and the memory of mass-murders of Chinese in Malaya, Singapore and the Indonesian Archipelago in the second half of the twentieth century. Currently he writes a comparative history of inter-ethnic conflicts in two de-colonized territories: British Malaya and Palestine, with a focus on the transfer of administrators and policies between these two remote places. 

Dr Seema Shekhawat holds a doctorate degree in Political Science. She has worked at the Universities of Jammu and Mumbai, India from 2004 to 2012. Dr. Shekhawat is a recipient of Scholar of Peace award from Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace, New Delhi, IPRA Foundation Peace grant and a fellowship from Berghof Foundation, Berlin. She worked as a consultant for Internal Displacement Monitoring Cell, Geneva in 2006 and 2010. She was the guest editor for January 2014 issue of Journal of Internal Displacement focusing on displaced women. Her major publications include Conflict and Displacement in Kashmir (Saksham Books, 2006);

Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Female Combatants in Conflict and Peace (Editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Dr. Christopher Snedden is an Australian politico-strategic analyst, author and academic specialising in South Asia.  Since first visiting India in 1981 to study meditation, he has worked with government, business and universities.  Currently, he is a Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii.  He has visited Jammu and Kashmir frequently to undertake research, which has resulted in two internationally acclaimed major works: The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir (republished in India as Kashmir: The Unwritten History) and Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris.  He has a deep understanding of the India-Pakistan relationship and their strategic perceptions.

Dr Bipasha Som is a faculty in the Department of English and Modern European Languages, Gautam Buddha University, Greater Noida. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur and has taught in various colleges and universities. Her area of interest consists of Indian Writing in English, Indian Bhasa writings in translation, literary theory and postcolonial studies.  Dr. Som has authored a book on Indian Writing in English and Bhasa writing, and contributed many papers in various journals.

 

Dr Adam Sutcliffe is Senior Lecturer in History, and Head of the Department of History, at King’s College London.  His work focusses on the intersections between Jewish history and European intellectual history, primarily from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, but also in more recent periods. He is the author of Judaism and Enlightenment (CUP 2003), and the co-editor, most recently, of Philosemitism in History (CUP, 2011), and of The Cambridge History of Judaism, volume VII: 1500-1815 (CUP, forthcoming). He is currently working on a monograph on Jews and radical politics between 1780 and 1848, and on a co-edited volume for Routledge, History, titled History, Memory and Public Life.

Swatie is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, University of Delhi. She is working on a dissertation titled ‘The New Normal’: Trauma, biopolitics and visuality after 9/11. Her areas of interest include trauma theory, the Holocaust, post-9/11 American politics, globalisation, etc.

Dr Glenn Timmermans is professor of Literature in the Department of English at the University of Macau, where he also teaches courses on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights. He initiated and co-ordinates the annual Yad Vashem Seminar on Holocaust Education for Chinese Educators and also teaches on the annual London Jewish Cultural Centre Seminar on Jewish History and the Holocaust in China. Professor Timmermans is also a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar on Holocaust and Genocide Education.

Dr Sathyaraj Venkatesan is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He received his PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He was a Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and currently, an International Field Bibliographer with the Publications of Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). His primary research concentrates on Graphic Medicine and Comics. He is an author of Mapping the Margins: A Study of Feminist Consciousness in Toni Morrison (2011) and a consulting reader with “The Explicator” published by Taylor and Francis. His articles have appeared in The Explicator, International Fiction Review, MELUS, Notes on Contemporary Literature, American Notes and Queries, among others.

Tomas Vojta is currently finishing his Ph.D. at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. He is also teaching the Second World War history in Eastern Europe. He is also the author of several articles (e.g. Rethinking the Elimination of Traces of Mass Murder at the Treblinka Extermination Camp, in: The Holocaust: Memories and History. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4438-5477-1). His doctoral thesis deals with the variety of the Polish attitudes towards the Shoah in Government General. 

Niké Wentholt works as a PhD researcher at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Currently, she is based at Sofia University, Bulgaria, for field work. She obtained a Master of Science degree in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Oxford and completed her undergraduate studies in History at the University of Groningen (cum laude). Her academic interests include transitional justice, memory politics, (South)Eastern Europe, and European Union enlargement. When it comes to traveling, she happily adds Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia to this list.

 

Dr Yakov Zinberg is a Lecturer in international relations at Kokushikan University, Tokyo, and North East Asia regional editor for Boundary and Security Bulletin (IBRU, University of Durham, UK). Formerly Research Associate at Hokkaido University's Slavic Research Center. He has published extensively on Japan's territorial issues, in English and Japanese. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, he is a US citizen and spends part of the year in Washington, DC.