Concluding Discussion / Clausura

Victoria Sanford, Lehman College, CUNY

Wolf Gruner, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Victoria Sanford is professor and chair of anthropology and founding director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College.  She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (2003), Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (2008), La Masacre de Panzos: Etnicidad, Tierra y Violencia en Guatemala (2009), and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation’s report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is co-editor (with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi) of The State and Gender Violence (2016). In August of 2012, she served as an invited expert witness on the Guatemalan genocide before Judge Santiago Pedraz in the Spanish National Court’s international genocide case against the Guatemalan generals.

Originally from Germany, Wolf Gruner is a specialist for the research of the Holocaust and Central European Jewish history, topics on which he published ten books and around 70 articles and book chapters by now. Most recently, he published a prizewinning book on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. He just finished an exciting decade-long research project on forgotten acts of individual defiance and protest of German and Austrian Jews in Nazi Germany. The soon to be published book will fundamentally revise our understanding of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Additional areas of research include the comparative history of mass violence and its resistance on a global scale, as well as racial and state discrimination against Indigenous and other minority populations, especially in Latin America. Since 2008, he is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at the University of Southern California. In 2014, Professor Gruner became the founding director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research (previously the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research). He is a member of the Academic Committee of the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and co-founder of the National Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies.