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Marines at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, engage enemy targets in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Marines at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, engage enemy targets in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Biographies of Participants

Benjamin Brower is assistant professor of history at The University Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from Cornell University. Brower is a historian of modern France and its colonies, with a focus on Algeria. His research examines the colonial situation, and its impact on the societies of the colonized and colonizers. His first book, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of French Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (2009) tells the story of colonial violence in nineteenth-century Algeria. Brower is currently working on a second book project entitled The Colonial Hajj, 1798-1962, which explores the history of pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places made by Mulisms subject to French colonial rule. His broader research interests include European imperialism, questions of secularism and Islam, and understanding violence in history. Previously, he taught at Texas A&M University and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. (2007-08).

Gregory Burke is a celebrated playwright known for his comedic interpretation of dark subjects. Burke was born in Dumferline, Scotland and currently resides in Edinburgh. In 2001, he completed a residency at the Royal National Theatre Studio. In 2006, Burke’s play Black Watch debuted at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It has won the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Play, the South Bank Show Theater Award, and Best New Play at the Laurence Olivier Awards in 2009. Burke has also received multiple awards for his other works including the Critics Circle Most Promising Playwright Award in 2002 and Best New Play at the TMA Barclays Awards and the Meyer-Whitworth Award for Gagarin Way. Burke’s most recent play, Battery Farm, which has yet to be released, is a dark comedy about the future of elder care and those who tend to the sick and elderly. It draws attention to issues of diminishing space, time and resources.

Charlotte Canning is head of the MA/PhD Programs in Performance as Public Practice in the Theatre & Dance Department at The University of Texas. She received her doctorate from the University of Washington. Canning is the author of Feminist Theaters In The USA: Staging Women's Experience (Routledge, 1996) and The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa, 2005), which won the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Tom Postlewait, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press and she is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for her next monograph, On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism. She has published in many journals, including Theatre Research International, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Journal. She teaches theatre and performance history and historiography, as well as feminist performance theory. Additionally, Canning has served as the Book Review Editor for Theatre Journal, President of the Women and Theatre Program, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Fine Arts. She is a past President of the American Society for Theatre Research. Currently she serves as the Associate Editor for Theatre Research International, the journal of the International Federation for Theatre Research. She will assume the editorship in 2013.

Sarah Cline is the Center Administrator of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas School of Law, where she has worked since July 2006. Cline received her M.A. in International Relations from Baylor University and her B.A. in International Relations and Sociology from Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to joining the Rapoport Center, Cline worked for various intergovernmental and nongovernmental human rights organizations, including the United Nations Human Rights Committee and World Vision International in Geneva and The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Nicholas Cull is professor of public diplomacy and director of the Masters Program in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. He received both his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Leeds. While a graduate student, he received a Harkness Fellowship to study at Princeton University. From 1992 to 1997 he was lecturer in American History at the University of Birmingham. From September 1997 to August 2005, he was professor of American studies and director of the Centre for American Studies in the Department of History at Leicester. Cull is President of the International Association for Media and History, a member of the Public Diplomacy Council and has worked closely with the British Council's Counterpoint Think Tank. Cull’s research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary and focus on the role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He wrote a critical piece on Black Watch, “The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch: Theatre as Cultural Diplomacy” (USC Center on Public Diplomacy, 2007). He is the author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge, 2008). His first book, Selling War (OUP, 1995), was a study of British information work in the United States before Pearl Harbor; it was named by Choice Magazine as one of the ten best academic books of that year. He is the co-editor (with David Culbert and David Welch) of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500-present (ABC-CLIO, 2003), which was one of Booklist magazine's reference books of the year, and co-editor with David Carrasco of Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (University of New Mexico Press, 2004). He has published numerous articles on the theme of propaganda and media history. He is an active film historian who has been part of the movement to include film and other media within the mainstream of historical sources.

Kate Doyle is senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at The National Security Archive. She currently directs the Guatemala Project, which aims to obtain documents on U.S.-Guatemalan relations, and the Mexico Project, an investigation into democracy and human rights in Mexico that has compiled thousands of declassified U.S. and Mexican government documents on Mexico’s history of authoritarianism and democratic transition. She edited two of the Archive's collections of declassified records—Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954-1999 and El Salvador: War, Peace and Human Rights, 1980-1994—and numerous Electronic Briefing Books for the Archive's Web site. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions and prosecutors to obtain government records from secret archives that shed light on state violence. She has testified as an expert witness in numerous human rights hearings, such as the 2008 trial of Peru’s former President Alberto Fujimori for his role in overseeing military death squads. Doyle also works with citizen groups throughout the region on their campaigns for government transparency, accountability and the right to information and has written about access to information in Latin America and the United States. She is a member of the advisory boards of the World Policy Journal, the Journal of the Right to Information, and the Fund for Constitutional Government in Washington. Her articles have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Boston Globe, World Policy Journal, Current History, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and other publications. Doyle received her M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Laura Edmondson is an associate professor of theatre studies at Dartmouth College whose work focuses on East African performance.  Her recent work addresses transnational narratives of violence and war.   Her articles on Tanzanian and Ugandan theater have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, TDR, and the anthologies African Performance Arts (Routledge 2002) and Violence Performed (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).  Her book, Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage, was published by Indiana University Press in 2007.  Her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Association of University Women. In 2008, she co-organized “Eti! East Africa Speaks!,” a residency for East African theatre artists at Dartmouth College and in New York City.  Also a playwright, she is currently collaborating on a performance piece, "Forged in Fire," with Ugandan performer Okello Kelo Sam and Tanzanian musician Robert O. Ajwang'.  The piece integrates music, dance, and text to explore Okello's personal experiences of the civil war in northern Uganda. She is now working on her second book, Genocide Performed: Narratives of Violence from Uganda, Rwanda, and the DRC.

Karen Engle is Cecil D. Redford Professor in Law at The University of Texas School of Law, and founding director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Baylor University. Engle writes and lectures extensively on international human rights law. She is the author of The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press 2010) and co-editor of After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture (Routledge 1995). Her recent works include "The Force of Shame" (2010), "Indigenous Rights Claims in International Law: Self-Determination, Culture and Development" (2009), "Judging Sex in War" (2008), "Calling in the Troops: The Uneasy Relationship Among Human Rights, Women's Rights and Humanitarian Intervention" (2007), and "Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing War-Time Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina" (2005). Engle received a Bellagio Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2009 and an assignment as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Bogota in 2010. She is also an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies and of Gender and Women's Studies.

Frances T. “Sissy” Farenthold currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and on the Advisory Board of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. A native Texan, Farenthold is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Texas Law School. She has been involved in public affairs at the local, state, national and international levels. She served two terms in the Texas House of Representatives and in 1972, became the first woman ever to have her name placed in nomination for vice president of the United States. Over the course of her career, Farenthold has served as a human rights observer in El Salvador, Iraq, Honduras, South Korea, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba and the former Soviet Union. In addition to her governmental work, Farenthold served as the first woman ever to be named president of Wells College. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and founded the Public Leadership Education Network. She has taught at Texas Southern University Law School, University of Houston Law School, and Thurgood Marshall School of Law. She was also the chairwoman of the Rothko Chapel in Houston until last year and was recently awarded a lifetime achievement honor from the American Civil Liberties Union in Texas.

Paul Gready is founding director of the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York (UK). He has worked for Amnesty International (on East and Southern Africa and India) and a number of other international and national human rights organizations and has wide-ranging experience as a human rights consultant. Most of Gready’s practitioner and consultancy experience has been in Africa, with a particular focus on South Africa. Linking academia and practice-based work, Gready has published on diverse human rights-related topics, notably transitional justice and human rights and development. His most recent book, The Era of Transitional Justice: Aftermaths of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond has recently been published by Routledge (2011). He is the co-editor of a new journal, the Journal of Human Rights Practice published by Oxford University Press. For over a decade he has also been involved in the development of interdisciplinary, practice-based human rights teaching curricula.

Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD from State University of New York at Buffalo. She has also taught at the American University in Cairo, University College Galway, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and University of Natal in Durban. Her teaching and research interests include imperialism and orientalism, and literature and human rights/social justice. Her recent publications include: After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), Archives of Empire: Vol 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Vol 11: The Scramble for Africa (2003), co-edited with Mia Carter. She is currently working on an intellectual bio-bibliography of the South African activist, Ruth First.

Jeffrey Helsing is deputy director of the United States Institute of Peace's (USIP) Education program.  He received his B.A. in history from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.  At USIP, Helsing focuses on education in international relations, conflict resolution, human rights and peace studies.  He has been responsible for many of the Institute's faculty and teacher workshops as well as curriculum development in the United States and in conflict zones abroad, particularly in the Middle East. For the past five years, Helsing has worked with groups in Israel and the Palestinian Authority training educators, NGO workers, university students and young leaders in developing conflict resolution, nonviolence, human rights, and communication and facilitation skills. Helsing has twenty years of experience as an educator. He was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo and has taught at Georgetown University, The George Washington University, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught a broad range of international relations subjects, including conflict resolution, human rights, comparative foreign policies, American foreign policy and international relations theory. Helsing’s recent publications include: Human Rights and Conflict: Exploring the Links between Rights, Law and Peacebuilding, co-edited with Julie Mertus (USIP Press, 2006), and “Young People's Activism and the Transition to Peace: Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Israel," in Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peacebuilding, co-author, edited by Siobhán McEvoy-Levy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

Helen Kinsella is assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She is a graduate of University of Minnesota-Minneapolis and, prior to her appointment at Wisconsin, held pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University and Stanford University, respectively. Kinsella’s research and teaching interests include contemporary political theory, feminist theories, international law (international humanitarian and human rights law, in particular) and armed conflict (with a focus on gender and armed conflict).  Her book manuscript entitled, The Image Before the Weapon: a Critical History of the ‘Combatant’ and ‘Civilian’ in International Law and Politics, is under contract with Cornell University Press. Her recent publications include, “Understanding a War That is Not a War” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2007), “Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in Laws of War” in Political Theory (Sage Publications, 2006), and “Discourses of Difference: Civilians, Combatants, and Compliance with the laws of war” in the Review of International Studies (British International Studies Association, 2005).

Neloufer de Mel is professor of English and Director of the International Unit of the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. She received her B.A. with Honors from the University of Kelaniya, her M.A. from the University of Peradeniva, and her Ph.D. in Nationalism and Post-colonial Theater from the University of Kent at Canterbury. She recently served as a Women Living Religion Fellow for the Women Religion and Globalization project at Yale University, which examines the role of religious women in processes of globalization. Neloufer de Mel’s research and teaching interests are in the fields of Afro-Caribbean literature, Nationalism and Theater, Gender Studies, and Post-colonial Cultural Studies. In 2007, she published a book entitled Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Sri Lankan Armed Conflict (Sage Publications), which engages in a critical analysis of the gendered dynamics of the Sri Lankan conflict while highlighting the way militarization is capable of transforming society. She has recently published several articles including, “Between the War and the Sea: Critical Events, Contiguities and Feminist Domains” in Intervention: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Francis & Taylor, 2007), and “Critical Borders: The Nation and its Premises in Sri Lankan Literature in English” in Polity (currently in press). Additionally, she has co-edited two books, At the Cutting Edge: Essays in Honour of Kumari Jayawardena (Women Unlimited, 2007), with Selvy Thiruchandran, and Writing an Inheritance: Women’s Writing in Sri Lanka 1860-1948 (Women’s Education & Research Centre, 2002), with Minoli Samarakkodi.

Fionnualla D. Ní Aoláin is Dorsey & Whitney Chair in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and professor of law at the University of Ulster’s Transitional Justice Institute in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is co-founder and associate director of the Institute. She received her LL.B. and Ph.D. in law from the Queen’s University Law Faculty in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School. Ní Aoláin was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School in 2003-04. Ní Aoláin’s teaching and research interests are in the fields of international law, human rights law, national security law, and feminist legal theory. She has published extensively in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, transitional justice, and sex-based violence in times of war. Her most recent book, Law in Times of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2006), was awarded the American Society of International Law’s preeminent prize in 2007: the Certificate of Merit for creative scholarship. She was a representative of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia (1996-97). Her forthcoming book is called Gender and the Post-Conflict Process (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010) (with Naomi Cahn & Dina Francesca Haynes). In 2003, Ní Aoláin was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as Special Expert on promoting gender equality in times of conflict and peace-making. She has been nominated twice by the Irish government to the European Court of Human Rights (in 2004 and 2007), the first woman and the first academic lawyer to be thus nominated.  She was appointed by the Irish Minister of Justice to the Irish Human Rights Commission in 2000 and served until 2005. She remains an elected member of the Executive Committee for the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice and is also a member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

Michael Rothberg is founding director of the new Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois. A Professor of English and a Conrad Humanities Scholar, Rothberg served as Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory from 2003-2009. Rothberg also works with departments and programs affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory: Germanic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Culture and Society. Rothberg’s interests are in the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies, critical theory and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literature. His work has been published in such journals as American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, History and Theory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, and Hungarian. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Rutgers University Press, 2003) with Neil Levi and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (State University of New York Press, 2009) with Peter Garrett. His current work explores the relationship between trauma, memory, and justice in a variety of national and transnational contexts.

Priya Satia is assistant professor of modern British history at Stanford University.  She has a B.A./B.S. from Stanford, a Masters and Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Masters from the London School of Economics. Satia’s research interests include modern British cultural and political history, colonialism and imperialism, the experience and practice of war, technology and culture, human rights and humanitarianism, the state and institutions of government, arms trade, political economy of empire, environmental history.  She has written extensively on Iraq’s colonial history.  Her works on this topic include, "The Forgotten History of Knowledge and Power in British Iraq, or Why Minerva’s Owl Cannot Fly." Social Science Research Council, October 17, 2008; Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2008); "Developing Iraq: Britain, India, and the Redemption of Empire and Technology in World War I." Past & Present, 197(1):211-255, 2007; and "The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia." The American Historical Review, 111.1, 2006.  Her book, Spies in Arabia, was the winner of the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, the AHA Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize 2009, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference of British Studies Book Prize.

Pauline Strong is director of the Humanities Institute and associate professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. She has published on the representation of Native American cultures and identities in North American literature, scholarship, film, art, museums, sports events, legislation, social movements, and youth organizations. Her current research concerns the role that 20th-century youth organizations played in the development of racialized and gendered U.S. citizens. She is the author of Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narrative (1999)and co-editor (with Sergei Kan) of New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, Representations (2006). Her articles appear in journals and anthologies in the fields of American studies, cultural studies, history, media studies, Native American studies, and sports studies as well as anthropology. Previously she served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and Councilor of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Strong received her bachelor's degree in philosophy from Colorado College and graduate degrees in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Ralph Wilde is a member of the Law Faculty at University College London, University of London. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He received his LL.M. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Wilde is an expert in public international law, and also has an interest in the interface between international law and related academic disciplines, including international relations and legal and political theory. He is a leading authority internationally on the administration of territory by international organizations and the concept of trusteeship in international law and public policy.  His monograph on this topic, International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away (OUP, 2008), won the Certificate of Merit (book prize) of the American Society of International Law in 2009. Wilde’s current research also focuses on the extraterritorial application of human rights law.  His publications on this topic include ‘Legal “Black Hole”?:  Extraterritorial state action and international treaty law on civil and political rights’ (2005) 26(3) Michigan Journal of International Law 739 – 806.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is the 2010-11 Cline Visiting Professor in the Humanities, a program of the University of Texas at Austin Humanities Institute. Wright received his B.A. from Tulane University and his M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the American University in Cairo.  Wright began his writing career in 1971 at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. He has worked for numerous publications, including Southern Voices, Texas Monthly, and Rolling Stone. In December 1992, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he published a number of notable articles.  He has won the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, and Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for Best Magazine Reporting. His recent publications include a history of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Lionel Gelber Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The NYU School of Journalism recently honored the book as one of the ten best works of journalism in the previous decade. In 2006, Wright premiered his one-man play, "My Trip to al-Qaeda," at The New Yorker Festival and the Culture Project in Soho. It has since been made into a documentary film, directed by Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney, and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, Who Do.