MLT Aikins St. Paul's College University Affiliation Lecture

Alexander Hinton (@AlexLHinton) is an award-winning author or editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU, 2021), Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell, 2022) and Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (Stanford, 2023). Most recently, he received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in the Media Award in 2022, a 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Network of Genocide Scholars, and a H. F. Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award in 2024.

Dr. Marsoobian has lectured and published extensively on topics in moral philosophy, American philosophy, genocide studies, human rights, aesthetics, Armenian photography & cinema. He taught courses on human rights, genocide and Holocaust studies, and the Armenian Genocide, including courses on literary and artistic responses to mass atrocity. He has worked closely with NGOs in Turkey that focus on the treatment of minorities and accountability for the Armenian Genocide.

Dr. Marsoobian has co-edited seven books, including Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Genocide and Memory (2018), Criticism and Compassion: The Ethics and Politics of Claudia Card (2018), Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair (2007). His book, Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia, is based upon extensive research about his family, the Dildilians, who were accomplished Ottoman Armenian photographers.

Dr. Marsoobian serves as an Affiliated Faculty member of the Institute of Human Rights at University of Connecticut, and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. He is Editor-in-Chief the journal, Metaphilosophy and serves as First Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Heather Eaton holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in ecology, feminism and theology and is engaged in ecological, feminist and liberation theologies, religion and science, inter-religious responses to ecological crisis.

Books include: Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation: New Perspectives on Nonviolent Theories with Lauren Levesque (2016), The Intellectual Journey of Thomas Berry: Imagining the Earth Community (2014), Ecological Awareness: Exploring Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics, with Sigurd Bergmann (2011) Introducing Ecofeminist Theologies (2005), and Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Religion, Culture, Context (2003) with Lois Ann Lorentzen, and dozens of academic articles.

Board member of Worldviews: Global Religions, Environment and Culture, of the Religion and Ecology session of the American Academy of Religion, and past president of the Canadian Theological Society. Recent work includes: a) peace and conflict studies on gender, ecology, religion: b) animal rights: c) nonviolence: d) wonder.

Dr. Kate E. Temoney is trained as a comparative religious ethicist and earned an M.Ed. from The College of William & Mary, USA and a Religion M.A. and Ph.D. from Florida State University, USA. She is the co-chair of the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

A selection of her publications include: "The 1994 Rwandan Genocide: The Religion/Genocide Nexus, Sexual Violence, and the Future of Genocide Studies” in Genocide Studies and Prevention (2016); “Religion and Genocide Nexuses: Bosnia as Case Study,” Religions (2017); “Counter-terrorism and Religious Violence in Nigeria: A Human Rights Perspective on the Doctrine of Necessity” in Law and Religion in Africa, co-author Simeon O. Ilesanmi (2018); and “Anatomizing White Rage: ‘Race is My Religion!’ and ‘White Genocide'" in The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Racial Progress (2020).

Dr. Temoney's Profile Page at Montclair State University

Tom Crick joined the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program in 1994 where he is currently the Associate Director. Mr. Crick has worked on numerous Carter Center conflict management and election initiatives, primarily in Africa, including supporting high level mediation efforts by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in Sudan, Uganda, and the Great Lakes region. Most recently, his work has focused on peace-building and conflict prevention in post-war Liberia where he leads the Center’s on-going Access to Justice project that works toward social cohesion, violence prevention, and good governance. In 2014-2015 he coordinated the Carter Center’s response to the Ebola crisis in Liberia.

Mr. Crick holds a Bachelor’s degree in Politics from Bristol University in the U.K. and a Master’s degree in Irish Political Studies from the Queen's University of Belfast. He has conducted doctoral research at the London School of Economics and Emory University and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Emory University School of Law School, teaching Advanced International Negotiation.

In his spare time, Mr. Crick is a football (soccer) coach, a Marx Brothers fan, and an unsuccessful dog trainer.

Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (2017)

This book offers a rationale for and ways of reading popular culture for peace. It argues that we can improve peacebuilding theory and practice through examining popular culture’s youth revolutionaries and their outcomes - from their digital and plastic renderings to their living embodiments in local struggles for justice.

The study combines insights from post-structural, post-colonial, feminist, youth studies and peace and conflict studies theories to analyze the literary themes, political uses, and cultural impacts of two hit book series – Harry Potter and The Hunger Games – tracing how these works have been transformed into visible political practices, including social justice advocacy and government propaganda in the War on Terror.

Pop culture production and consumption help maintain global hierarchies of inequality and structural violence but can also connect people across divisions through fandom participation. Including chapters on fan activism, fan fiction, Guantanamo Bay detention center, youth as a discursive construct in IR, and the merchandizing and tourism opportunities connected with The Hunger Games, the book argues that through taking youth-oriented pop culture seriously, we can better understand the local, global and transnational spaces, discourses, and the relations of power, within which meanings and practices of peace are known, negotiated, encoded and obstructed.

Find the book on Amazon.

Dr. Janie Leatherman is professor of politics and international studies. She is Chair of Politics, Director of the Humanitarian Action Minor, and Project Director of Collaborative Project in Student Learning: The Examination of Enduring Questions through Humanitarian Education (Teagle Foundation Grant)

Dr. Leatherman's training and consultancy in conflict resolution include the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, the United Nations University, Catholic Relief Services, Search for Common Ground, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations (New York). She has grants from national and international funding sources, including the Department of Education, United States Institute of Peace, the Social Science Research Council, Pew Foundation, Swedish Government, and also the Fulbright-Hayes and American Scandinavian dissertation fellowships. She has delivered more than 50 public addresses and dozens of conference papers in national and international forum.

Dr. Leatherman served as Director of International Studies at Fairfield University from 2006-2012. Her prior appointments include Director of International Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University (1997-2006), Visiting Fellow, the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame (1992-1997), and Visiting Assistant Professor, Macalester College (1989-1991). She was Director of Brethren Colleges Abroad and taught at the University of Barcelona from 1991-1992. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies (1991).

Dr. Leatherman's work on sexual violence examines its pervasive reality in many contemporary warzones; asks how such atrocity becomes normalized through a complex interplay of local to global forces, and explores the range of humanitarian responses from pyschosocial, protection, caring and social transformation. Her most recent publication Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict explores the catastrophic, and often hidden, consequences for women, men, girls, and boys in conflict zones, and how the destruction of their lives along with family and community is linked to a global political economy of violence and its networks of plunder and profit, especially with illicit goods and conflict minerals and other commodities.

Safe space is an overlooked concept, whose protection is vital to the security of famliies and communities around the world, and yet seems to be collapsing in many contexts. These range from the impact of global climate change, fragile and collapsing states, piracy, kidnappings, loss of safe space in humanitarian crises and war, the global rise in domestic violence, human trafficking, and sweatshops, to terrorism, and the linkages among them. As globalization has collapsed time and space, it has disarticulated the territoriality of the inter-state and associated war system, while accelerating the movement of people, goods and ideas, prompting a mismatch between global humanitarian and human rights norms and the system they were designed for, and contemporary threats. Safe space in one sector after another (humanitarian spaces, schools, markets, malls, public transport, hospitals, religious and cultural sites, etc.) situated historically under the protective arm of international regimes and associated state duties is in peril. The emergence of the responsibility to protect is just one manifestation of the struggle to respond to the pervasive collapse of safe space.

John Packer is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre (HRREC) at the University of Ottawa. He previously held academic positions at the University of Essex and at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has held Fellowships at Cambridge and Harvard Universities and lectured at universities and professional institutions around the world.

Professor Packer is an experienced practitioner with over 20 years of experience working for intergovernmental organizations, including for the United Nations (UNHCR, ILO, OHCHR) i.a. investigating serious human rights violations in a number of situations, notably Iraq, Afghanistan, and Burma/Myanmar, as well as themes including extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, the use of forensic sciences, the use of civil defense forces, and regarding the independence of judges and lawyers throughout the world.

From 1995 to 2004, he was Senior Legal Adviser and then the first Director of the Office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) in The Hague working across Central and Eastern Europe and throughout the former Soviet Union.

From 2012 to 2014, Prof. Packer was a Constitutions and Process Design Expert on the United Nation’s Standby Team of Mediation Experts attached to the Department of Political Affairs (DPA), advising in numerous peace processes and political transitions around the world focusing on conflict prevention and resolution, diversity management, constitutional and legal reform, and the protection of human rights including minorities. He is Associate Editor of the Human Rights Law Journal and a General Editor of the European Yearbook of Minority Issues, and has sat on the boards of several international human rights NGOs.

Dr. Celia Cook-Huffman teaches in the Peace and Conflict Studies program and is the Associate Director of the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Her background combines peace studies with specialized training and education in conflict resolution, nonviolence, gender, and mediation. The focus of her teaching is on understanding how conflict affects individuals, communities and the world system. In exploring conflict, Dr. Cook-Huffman asks students to think about both how to wage conflicts productively as well as how to resolve them. In all her courses, she encourages students to think creatively about conflict and the dangers and opportunities it brings to our lives.

Outside the classroom, Dr. Cook-Huffman has worked with the college community, churches, school and small businesses, teaching mediation and conflict resolution skills, and providing community mediation services under the auspices of the Baker Institute.

Her research focuses on the impact of social identity on conflict and the relationship between gender issues and conflict. She received the Juniata Junior Faculty Distinguished Teaching Award in 1996. She has a BA in peace studies and conflict resolution from Manchester College, an MA in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame where she was an International Scholars Program Fellow, and a PhD from Syracuse University. She currently holds the W. Clay and Kathryn H. Burkholder Professorship in Conflict Resolution.