Human Rights / Norms

Research Interest

Matthew Kovac

Graduate Student
History

Matthew Kovac is PhD student in History at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the Irish republican movement, decolonization, and the Global Cold War.

Kovac is the recipient of the 2021 IIS Pre-Dissertation Research Grant.

Blaze Joel

Graduate Student
History

Blaze Joel is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on nationalism, memory, violence, and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. He studies these issues in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country, as well as in an international, trans-European framework. He also studies the Cold War in a global perspective.

Joel is a recipient of the 2021 IIS...

Scott Straus

Professor
Political Science

Scott Straus (Ph.D. Berkeley, 2004) is a Professor of Political Science who studies political violence, genocide, human rights, and post-conflict politics with an empirical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Improving World Order, the...

Mark Danner

Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education
Graduate School of Journalism
English

Mark Danner is longtime journalist and writer who holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching in both the Graduate School of Journalism and the Department of English. He writes about political violence, war, and American politics, mostly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and teaches courses in foreign and war reporting and the realist and modernist novel.

Rafi Lazerson

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Rafi Lazerson is an MPA candidate at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley. His policy focus is on interdisciplinary evidence-based approaches to address extremist disinformation online and related security threats. Rafi has several years of professional experience in research-solutions, advocacy, organization leadership, project management, and partnership-facilitation. He received a BA in Political Science from the Brooklyn College Scholars Program.

Amy Benziger

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Amy Benziger is an experienced strategist whose work has focused on the intersection of technology, social impact and advocacy. She is pursuing a Master of Public Affairs at the Goldman School with a focus on technology policy.

Shawn Ewbank

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Shawn Ewbank is an MPA Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley's Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy. He is focused on societal transformation towards peace, specifically in the context of climate change, technology, democracy and economy.

Laura Lyons

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Laura Lyons is a Master of Public Affairs candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy. She studies corporate sustainability, climate change, and human rights.

Karely Ordaz

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Karely Ordaz is a public sector leader with close to a decade working for the public good in both local government and community-based organizations. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley in American Studies with a concentration in Environment, Policy and Public Health. She was born in Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. at age 4.

In her role as Chief of Staff at a community development corporation (CDC), she leads the organization’s policy and advocacy priorities focused on achieving social equity. Prior to that she worked for an anchor institution in San Francisco...

Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Associate Professor of History
History

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses primarily upon women, slavery, and colonial and 19th-century legal and economic history. She is currently completing a book that reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the lives and experiences of free and captive women living on three continents in its telling.