91视频

The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention

Mission of the Center

The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention promotes innovative research, curricula and pedagogies leading to the deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of genocide and mass violence.

The Schaeffer Center is a space for critical conversations that connect the past and future and brings together renowned academics as well as creating opportunities for prospective researchers.

The Center engages with its mission topics through conferences, lectures, and workshops. It is incorporated into the 91视频 community, encouraging and enabling research and resources for students, faculty and staff as well as hosting lectures and conferences on campus. One of the Centers most valued resources is the Visual History Archive and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust testimonies, which has provided an important role in disseminating new insights into the origins of collective hatred, mass violence, and the aftereffects of historical, social and individual memory.

The Founders

GEORGE & IRINA SCHAEFFER

91视频 PARENTS鈥17

Our generous donors dreamed of bringing the Visual History Archive to France and facilitating a space for research into mass violence and the prevention of genocide. Learn more about their work here.

The Community at 91视频

PROFESSOR BRIAN SCHIFF

Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention

Professor Schiff works with 91视频 faculty, students and the broader research community to provide cross-disciplinary scholarship on the contributions of the archives to the possibility of enduring peace and understanding. Read Brian's full bio here. 聽

CONSTANCE P脗RIS DE BOLLARDI脠RE

Assistant Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention.

As a historian, Constance contributes to the scientific agenda of the Center. She defended her Ph.D. in History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes an Sciences Sociales in 2017. Her research, entitled 鈥淭he Everlastingness of our People鈥: An American Jewish Socialist Aid in the Yiddish Diaspora, the Jewish Labor Committee in Postwar France (1944-49)鈥, focuses on the transnational relation between Yidish speaking socialists 鈥 mainly Bundists and left wing Zionists 鈥 in America and France in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and deals with social work, displacement and migration of Holocaust survivors, Yiddish culture, identity, memory, politics and labor during the early Cold War.

Her current research concerns are Holocaust memory in Yiddish and the use of testimonies in historical research on mass violence. Read Constance's full bio here.

KELLY DEMJANICK

Administrator and Communications Coordinator of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention. Kelly also supervises the viewing of the Archives at 91视频 and assists in research projects. She holds a JD, an LLM in International Comparative Law (Trinity College Dublin), and she completed her MA in International Affairs at 91视频 in 2019 and has worked in several legal environments.

The Scientific Committee

JESSICA FELDMAN

Professor Feldman joined the Global Communications faculty at 91视频 in 2018. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, after earning a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2017. Her dissertation considered how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames social and political possibilities. This research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation to support interdisciplinary research on privacy and democracy across the social sciences and engineering. She is also an artist whose work has been exhibited and performed internationally. She received an MFA from Bard in 2007 and taught media and sound art at Temple University and The New School from 2009-2012. She often collaborates with designers聽and combines theory and practice in her teaching and her research. Read Jessica鈥檚 full bio here.

CAROLINE LAURENT

Caroline D. Laurent is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies whose interdisciplinary research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literatures and cultures, with special emphasis on Metropolitan France, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. Professor Laurent notably specializes in comparative genocide studies in relation to literature and art. Her book manuscript, The Words of Others: Remembering and Writing Genocide as an Indirect Witness, examines literary and graphic representations of genocidal violence (the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmers rouges鈥 violence and genocide in Cambodia). She is particularly interested in the perspectives of indirect witnesses and in issues related to transgenerational transmission of trauma. She has published several articles on these questions in Nouvelles 茅tudes francophones, French Cultural Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Read Caroline鈥檚 full bio here.

ZED ZHIPENG GAO

Zed Zhipeng Gao is a political psychologist who approaches China and Chinese diaspora from interdisciplinary perspectives. His dissertation was on the history of psychology in Chinese communist movement. In this project, he examines how psychologists, when caught in the Cold War confrontation, national plan for economic development, malfunctioning bureaucracy, and ideological indoctrination, contributed to an inflated mass belief in human agency which in turned fueled the tragic unravel of the cultural revolution. More recently, Gao has been studying Chinese diaspora amid international conflict. In a journal special issue聽Theorizing the Psychology of Deglobalization聽that he co-edited, Gao discusses Chinese immigrants鈥 experience of 鈥渄ouble unbelonging鈥 that stems from both racism in the host country and nationalist exclusion from China. In another ongoing work, Gao analyzes how a persecuted and exiled religious organization, while continuing its protest against the Chinese authoritarian state, transmorphed into a major force in the right wing of North American politics.聽