Manu Bhagavan

Senior Fellow, RBI
manu.bhagavan@hunter.cuny.edu

Manu Bhagavan is Professor of History and Human Rights at Hunter College and the Graduate Center-The City University of New York, and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute.   He is the author of The Peacemakers (2012, 2013) and Sovereign Spheres (2003), the (co-) editor of 4 books, and the biography of Madam Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the world’s first celebrity diplomat from the Global South.  His edited volume on India and the Cold War is in production with the University of North Carolina Press and is expected in 2019.  Manu’s Quartz essay on global authoritarianism went viral internationally and was translated into German as the lead, cover article of the May 2016 Berliner Republik magazine.   He is the recipient of a 2006 Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and is an elected member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.   He regularly appears in the media to comment on global affairs. Follow @ManuBhagavan.

Debórah Dwork

Senior Scholar-in-Residence, RBI
ddwork@gc.cuny.edu
CV

Debórah Dwork is Senior Scholar-in Residence at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust survivors, Dwork weaves their narratives into the history she writes. Among her award-winning books, Children With A Star introduced a child-centered approach to historical investigation; Flight from the Reich opened the geographic view of the Holocaust and integrated the refugee experience into its history; Auschwitz drew the crucial connection between industrial killing and a society that believed it was involved in constructive activity; and Holocaust was the first book to negotiate the chasm between two histories: that of the perpetrators and that of the victims; the Nazis’ push towards a “Final Solution,” and the Jews’ reactions and responses. Internationally renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field. As the Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Inaugural Rose Professor of Holocaust History at Clark University, she envisioned and grew the Strassler Center into an eminent institute for doctoral training in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.

A member of the American delegation to the 34-state International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, she has been, inter alia, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Shapiro Senior Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Bildner Scholar at Rutgers University.

Ellen Chesler

Senior Fellow, RBI
ellen.chesler@gmail.com

With over thirty years of experience in government, philanthropy, and academia, Ellen Chesler is widely respected for the practical and intellectual perspectives she brings to public policy. Ellen is author of the critically celebrated Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. A finalist for PEN’s 1993 Martha Albrand award in nonfiction, the book was released in a new paperback edition in 2007. She is co-editor of Women and Girls Rising: Progress and Resistance around the World, a volume in RBI’s Global Institutions Series, and he is co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2005. She has also written numerous essays and articles for academic anthologies and for prominent newspapers, journals, periodicals, and blogs. For many years she was a Senior Fellow and Program Director in Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Open Society Foundations.

Ellen has extensive experience as a voluntary leader. She is a member and former chair of the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. She served two terms on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2006-2013) and chaired the board of the International Women’s Health Coalition (1997-2003). She has also long been active in Democratic politics, especially on behalf of women candidates, including New York Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand. She served as a U.S. public delegate to the 2009, 2010, and 2015 meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Early in her professional career, Ellen was chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, who was the first woman ever elected to citywide office in New York.

Tapio Kanningen

Senior Fellow, RBI
tapio.kanninen@gmail.com

Tapio Kanninen is senior fellow and co-director of the project on sustainable global governance at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Dr. Kanninen was chief of the Policy Planning Unit in the UN Department of Political Affairs and head of the secretariat of Kofi Annan’s five summits with regional organizations. He was also secretary and research focal point of the high-level drafting group of Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace, convener of the interdepartmental task force to implement its recommendations, as well as secretary of many General Assembly working groups on UN reform. Earlier, Dr. Kanninen also worked in a UNEP-funded project at the UN Statistical Office on establishing a global framework for environmental statistics and in Finland on environmental data and analysis of living conditions of various population groups.

Danielle Zach

Senior Fellow, RBI. Director of the Human Rights Hub
dzach@ccny.cuny.edu

Danielle A. Zach is Assistant Professor of Political Science & Human Rights at the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the Center for Worker Education (CWE). She is actively involved in CCNY’s Human Rights Forum; chair of CCNY’s Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference; host and producer of the Rights Talk at CCNY Downtown podcast; and steering committee member of the inter-CUNY Human Rights Hub. She is also an affiliated scholar of The CUNY Graduate Center’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies (RBIIS), Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity. She was previously Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Adelphi University, and Visiting Scholar of Irish Studies at New York University (NYU).

Amy Adamczyk

Senior Fellow, RBI.
AAdamczyk@jjay.cuny.edu 

Dr. Amy Adamczyk is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Trained as a sociologist of religion, her research focuses on how different contexts (e.g. nations, counties, friendship groups), and personal religious beliefs shape people’s deviant, moral, and health-related attitudes and behaviors. In 2025, she will publish her third book, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-national Public Opinion about Abortion, with Oxford University Press. Her coauthored book, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass their Religion on to the Next Generation, was a finalist for Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year Award, Marriage & Family Category. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the International Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences for Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes Across the Globe. She has also published 58 peer-reviewed journal articles. Her research has been supported with grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust of Nassau, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Jack Shand Research Award. To learn more, check out AmyAdamczyk.com/