Speaker Bios
Catharine Newbury
Professor of Government, Smith College
Catharine Newbury is Professor of Government at Smith College , and Five College Professor of Government and African Studies. She received her B.A. from Willamette University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include ethnicity and the state in Africa , democratization, the politics of peasants and women, and the politics of violence in Francophone Central Africa. She is the author of The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda and many articles on multiple aspects of Central African political processes.
Newbury teaches courses on African politics, women and politics in Africa, the Rwanda genocide in comparative perspective, and the politics of development. She is currently Director of the Five College African Scholars Program, a fellowship program which brings African scholars to the Five Colleges for research and writing.
Faculty Website: Smith College
Faculty Website: Five Colleges
Richard Breitman
Professor of History, American University, Washington, DC
Richard Breitman teaches courses in modern European history and German history. He is the author or co-author of nine books and many articles in German history, U. S. history, and the Holocaust. His most recent books are editions of the diaries of James G. McDonald (League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1933-35, and chairman of President Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, 1938-1945) in a series published by Indiana University Press. The first volume, Advocate for the Doomed, appeared in 2007, and the second volume, Refugees and Rescue, will appear in 2009. Breitman is editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which is owned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which helped to bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of U.S. government records under a 1998 law.
Breitman received a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a Masters from Yale University, and a Bachelors from Yale College.
Daniel Frank
Professor of Philosophy and Director of Jewish Studies, Purdue University
Daniel H. Frank is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Jewish
Studies Program at Purdue University. He specializes in ancient philosophy,
medieval philosophy, ethics and the history of political philosophy. He
received the Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship from the American Philosophical
Association (2003-2004) and the Visiting Research Fellowship of the British
Academy in London in 1994. He has co-edited with Oliver Leaman The Jewish
Philosophy Reader and The History of Jewish Philosophy for Routledge and
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy for the Cambridge
University Press. Dr. Frank earned his bachelor's degrees from the
University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cambridge and
his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael Morgan
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, Indiana University
Professor Morgan received a B.A. from Syracuse University in 1965, Rabbinic Ordination and a Master in Hebrew Letters from the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1978. He was a member of Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1973-1974. He came to Indiana University in 1975, became Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies in 1990, and was Associate Dean of the Faculties from 1994-1996.
Professor Morgan is a historian of philosophy and Jewish religious thought. He has published extensively in Ancient Greek philosophy, early modern philosophy, and twentieth century philosophy and intellectual culture. His work on Plato's philosophy places it within the context of fourth century Greek history and religious life, and his treatment of figures such as Spinoza, Hobbes, Mendelssohn, Buber, and Rosenzweig similarly explores their philosophical and religious thinking in historical context. Professor Morgan is an expert on the work of Emil Fackenheim, one of the most important twentieth century Jewish philosophers and the preeminent post-Holocaust Jewish thinker, and he has published extensively on the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish thought, Western culture, and philosophy. He also works in ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. His most recent work is on the twentieth century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
Professor Morgan has written and edited fifteen books and published over one hundred articles and reviews. In 1982 he was awarded the Amoco Foundation Teaching Award and was named Chancellor's Professor in 2004.
Book: The Holocaust Reader
Nancy Sinkoff
Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
Nancy Sinkoff is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at
Rutgers University, New Jersey, specializing in the history of Eastern
European Jewry, particularly early modern Poland. Her research interests
also include Christian-Jewish relations, Jewish politics, Jewish labor and
the Jewish Left and the European Enlightenment. She is the author of Out of
the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2004), and in
2008, Dr. Sinkoff wrote "Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz,"
Introduction to Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir,
1938-1947. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard-Radcliffe College,
her master's at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America and her PhD at Columbia University.
John Crook
JD, George Washington University Law School
John Crook currently serves as the Comissioner, Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, where he is a party appointed arbitrator on five-member claims commission established by Eritrea and Ethiopia in The Hague. He also serves as a party appointed arbitrator in the Grand River Enterprises vs. USA. Prior to this Mr. Crook served as the General Counsel, Multinational Force and Observers, Rome Italy, the Assistant Legal Advisor for UN Affairs with the U.S. Department of State, Counselor for Legal Affairs, U.S. Mission in Geneva. He also supervised negotiation and conclusion of U.S. treaties and agreements and directed Presidential treaty events at U.S.-Soviet Summits in Washington, DC and Moscow.
John Roth
Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College
John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
Claremont McKenna College (CMC) in Claremont, California, where he taught
from 1966 through 2006, and became the founding director of the Center for
the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights. Roth received his
BA with honors in philosophy from Pomona College and joined the CMC faculty
after earning his MA and PhD in philosophy at Yale University.
In 1988 Roth was named the National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Roth's expertise in Holocaust and genocide studies, as well as in philosophy, ethics, American studies, and religious studies, has been advanced by postdoctoral appointments as a Graves Fellow in the Humanities, a Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute, Yale University. Roth has served as Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, and as Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Franklin College, Lugano, Switzerland, and Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. In 2004-05, Roth was the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Roth has authored, coauthored, or edited more than forty books, including Ethics During and After the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments (Palgrave Macmillan).
Noel Twagiramungu
Ph.D. Candidate, Tufts University
Noel Twagiramungu is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School. He holds a BA degree from the National University of Rwanda and an LLM degree from Utrecht University- Netherlands. Before joining the Fletcher School, he was a Scholar-at-risk fellow at Harvard University.
