James Dawes is the Director of the Program in Human Rights and Humanitarianism. He is the author of That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Harvard University Press, 2007) and The Language of War (Harvard University Press, 2002), as well as numerous articles on topics including international law and human rights, literary and language theory, trauma, and pedagogical technique. He has appeared as the feature guest on radio interviews ranging from live, one-hour National Public Radio programs to the BBC Weekend News, and has been interviewed by The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many other newspapers.
Martin Gunderson is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University and his J.D. from the University of Minnesota. For the past two decades he has been interested in areas where healthcare, civil liberties and philosophy overlap. He has published on informed consent, physician-assisted death, suicide, medical privacy, confidentiality, and human rights. He is the co-author of AIDS: Testing and Privacy, and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals including The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the Journal of Social Philosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, and Philosophy and Medicine. He is currently working on human rights, especially as they apply to issues in healthcare. His recent work on human rights includes “Human Rights, Dignity, and the Science of Genetic Engineering,” and “Enhancing Human Rights: How the Use of Human Rights Treaties to Prohibit Genetic Engineering Weakens Human Rights.”
Erik Larson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Macalester College. His fields of interest include the sociology of human rights, sociology of law, political sociology, and comparative-historical sociology. He received his B.A. from Hamline University and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Recent research projects include consideration of the prospects of reconciliation after coups; study of the preparation, presentation, and interpretation of evidence for international treaty reporting and monitoring bodies; investigation of the nexus between the global indigenous rights movement and national and regional indigenous rights movements; and analysis of the political contention over economic affirmative action policies targeted on the basis of indigenous status. For this research, he has traveled to Fiji, Ghana, Iceland, and Switzerland. In addition, Professor Larson has collaborated with Macalester students to study the Ainu rights movement in Japan and to examine factors associated with school-wide performance on standardized tests in Minnesota.
Nadya Nedelsky Nadya Nedelsky is Associate Professor of International Studies. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Primary interests include human and minority rights, nationalism, ethnicity, democratization, citizenship, and transitional justice, with an area focus in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working as co-editor with Lavinia Stan on a two-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, under contract with Cambridge University Press. Her book, Defining the Sovereign Community: National Identity, Individual Rights, and Minority Membership in the Czech and Slovak Republics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) is part of the Penn Press series on Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Citizenship. She has also published chapters in edited volumes on transitional justice and articles in the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities, Nations and Nationalism, and Theory and Society.
Dianna Shandy is a socio-cultural anthropologist researching forced migration, humanitarian interventions, rapid social change, and gender. Her courses, Refugees and Humanitarian Response, Culture and Globalization, and Darfur: Conflict and Human Rights in Africa, contribute to the Human Rights and Humanitarianism program. Her research projects have spanned the southern Sudanese (Nuer) diaspora, African asylum seekers in Ireland, and post-conflict reconstruction in Namibia. She is the author of Nuer-American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migration and the editor (with Elzbieta Gozdziak) of two volumes on forced migration: Rethinking Refuge and Displacement and a special volume on religion and forced migration for the Journal of Refugee Studies. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University.
James von Geldern holds a J.D. from the University of Minnesota (2005), and a Ph.D. from Brown University in Slavic Literatures. He is a member of the International Studies Department, where he teaches human rights, international law and legal frameworks, and comparative studies in revolutions and nationalisms. He is a practicing attorney who represents asylum petitioners in the federal immigration courts. He is also chair of Russian Studies, where his primary interests are in Russian and Soviet popular culture and cultural history.
Joëlle Vitiello, associate professor and Department chair of French, specializes in 20th century French literature and culture. Between 1996-2002, she worked as an interpreter at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. She is also a member of the Haiti Justice Committee in the Twin Cities. She teaches contemporary French culture; Haitian literature and culture; francophone literatures; and cinema (French, North African and Sub-Saharan African). She recently taught a course on “difficult dialogues,” with a special focus on the Middle East region (Algeria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Israel-Palestine). She has co-edited two volumes on women writers, including Elles écrivent des Antilles: Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique. She also co-organized the first international Women in French Conference. Her research interests include postcolonial identities in the francophone world, systemic violence in Haiti, the Rwandan genocide, torture during the French-Algerian war, and the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961.
Wendy Weber teaches in the Political Science department at Macalester. Her subfield is International Relations, and within this subfield her work focuses on changing patterns of global governance, especially in the areas of human rights and humanitarianism. Her regular course offerings include: Foundations of International Politics; Global Governance; and Humanitarianism in World Politics. She has also recently taught topics courses on Women and Gender in International Relations and on the United Nations.
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James Dawes is the Director of the Program in Human Rights and Humanitarianism. He is the author of That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Harvard University Press, 2007) and The Language of War (Harvard University Press, 2002), as well as numerous articles on topics including international law and human rights, literary and language theory, trauma, and pedagogical technique. He has appeared as the feature guest on radio interviews ranging from live, one-hour National Public Radio programs to the BBC Weekend News, and has been interviewed by The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many other newspapers. 
Martin Gunderson is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University and his J.D. from the University of Minnesota. For the past two decades he has been interested in areas where healthcare, civil liberties and philosophy overlap. He has published on informed consent, physician-assisted death, suicide, medical privacy, confidentiality, and human rights. He is the co-author of AIDS: Testing and Privacy, and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals including The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the Journal of Social Philosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, and Philosophy and Medicine. He is currently working on human rights, especially as they apply to issues in healthcare. His recent work on human rights includes “Human Rights, Dignity, and the Science of Genetic Engineering,” and “Enhancing Human Rights: How the Use of Human Rights Treaties to Prohibit Genetic Engineering Weakens Human Rights.” 
Erik Larson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Macalester College. His fields of interest include the sociology of human rights, sociology of law, political sociology, and comparative-historical sociology. He received his B.A. from Hamline University and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Recent research projects include consideration of the prospects of reconciliation after coups; study of the preparation, presentation, and interpretation of evidence for international treaty reporting and monitoring bodies; investigation of the nexus between the global indigenous rights movement and national and regional indigenous rights movements; and analysis of the political contention over economic affirmative action policies targeted on the basis of indigenous status. For this research, he has traveled to Fiji, Ghana, Iceland, and Switzerland. In addition, Professor Larson has collaborated with Macalester students to study the Ainu rights movement in Japan and to examine factors associated with school-wide performance on standardized tests in Minnesota. 
Nadya Nedelsky Nadya Nedelsky is Associate Professor of International Studies. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Primary interests include human and minority rights, nationalism, ethnicity, democratization, citizenship, and transitional justice, with an area focus in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working as co-editor with Lavinia Stan on a two-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, under contract with Cambridge University Press. Her book, Defining the Sovereign Community: National Identity, Individual Rights, and Minority Membership in the Czech and Slovak Republics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) is part of the Penn Press series on Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Citizenship. She has also published chapters in edited volumes on transitional justice and articles in the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities, Nations and Nationalism, and Theory and Society.
Dianna Shandy is a socio-cultural anthropologist researching forced migration, humanitarian interventions, rapid social change, and gender. Her courses, Refugees and Humanitarian Response, Culture and Globalization, and Darfur: Conflict and Human Rights in Africa, contribute to the Human Rights and Humanitarianism program. Her research projects have spanned the southern Sudanese (Nuer) diaspora, African asylum seekers in Ireland, and post-conflict reconstruction in Namibia. She is the author of Nuer-American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migration and the editor (with Elzbieta Gozdziak) of two volumes on forced migration: Rethinking Refuge and Displacement and a special volume on religion and forced migration for the Journal of Refugee Studies. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. 
James von Geldern holds a J.D. from the University of Minnesota (2005), and a Ph.D. from Brown University in Slavic Literatures. He is a member of the International Studies Department, where he teaches human rights, international law and legal frameworks, and comparative studies in revolutions and nationalisms. He is a practicing attorney who represents asylum petitioners in the federal immigration courts. He is also chair of Russian Studies, where his primary interests are in Russian and Soviet popular culture and cultural history. 
Joëlle Vitiello, associate professor and Department chair of French, specializes in 20th century French literature and culture. Between 1996-2002, she worked as an interpreter at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. She is also a member of the Haiti Justice Committee in the Twin Cities. She teaches contemporary French culture; Haitian literature and culture; francophone literatures; and cinema (French, North African and Sub-Saharan African). She recently taught a course on “difficult dialogues,” with a special focus on the Middle East region (Algeria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Israel-Palestine). She has co-edited two volumes on women writers, including Elles écrivent des Antilles: Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique. She also co-organized the first international Women in French Conference. Her research interests include postcolonial identities in the francophone world, systemic violence in Haiti, the Rwandan genocide, torture during the French-Algerian war, and the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961. 
Wendy Weber teaches in the Political Science department at Macalester. Her subfield is International Relations, and within this subfield her work focuses on changing patterns of global governance, especially in the areas of human rights and humanitarianism. Her regular course offerings include: Foundations of International Politics; Global Governance; and Humanitarianism in World Politics. She has also recently taught topics courses on Women and Gender in International Relations and on the United Nations.