Visiting Scholars From Previous Years
Below is a list of Minerva's Visiting Scholars from recent years.
2016-17 Visiting Scholars:
Natan Sznaider
Professor of Sociology, The Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo
Prof. Dr. Natan Sznaider is professor of sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. He was born in Germany, educated in Israel and the United States. He has taught at Columbia University in New York and at Munich University in Germany. He is part of an international research team investigating cultural memory in Europe, Israel, and Latin America. His books include Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011), Human Rights and Memory (2010), Gedächtnisraum Europa: Kosmopolitismus: Jüdische Erfahrung und Europäische Vision (2008), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2005) and The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society (2001). During his visit to the center, Prof. Sznaider helped organize the international conference DNA, Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Uncovering the Truth About Political Crimes After the Genetic Turn.
Heather McRobie
Post-doctoral fellow, The Minerva Center for Human Rights, Tel Aviv University
Heather McRobie received a post-doctoral fellowship co-sponsored by Minerva Center for Human Rights, Cegla Center, and TAU. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford. Her research areas are transitional justice and constitutions in the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. Heather McRobie is reading for a DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies. Her research under the Minerva center investigates the concept of the constitution as a text and the role of constitution-writing in transitional justice processes, with particular focus on the Arab Spring. Prior to joining the Centre, McRobie studied Human Rights and Democracy (MA) at the University of Sarajevo, Islamic Studies at University of McGill, Modern History and Politics (BA) at the University of Oxford, and worked for human rights organizations in Jordan and Berlin.
Anna Su
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
Anna Su's primary areas of research include the law and history of international human rights law, U.S. constitutional law (First Amendment), and law and religion. Prof. Su holds an SJD from Harvard Law School where her dissertation was awarded the John Laylin Prize for best paper in international law. She received her JD and AB degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Prior to coming to Toronto, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy based in SUNY Buffalo Law School, and a graduate fellowship in ethics with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She worked as a law clerk for the Philippine Supreme Court and was a consultant to the Philippine government negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
2014-15 Visiting Scholars:
Naomi Roht-Arriaza
Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco
Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley, a M.A. from the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy (formerly the Graduate School of Public Policy), and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Professor Roght-Arriaza has worked as an immigration paralegal, an organizer, and a teacher for a nonprofit focused on corporate accountability. After graduating from law school, she clerked for Judge James Browning of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. During 1991 to 1992, Professor Roht-Arriaza was the first Riesenfeld Fellow in International Law and Organizations at UC Berkeley School of Law.
Professor Roht-Arriaza is the author of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (2005) and Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (1995), and coeditor of Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice. She is a coauthor on The International Legal System: Cases and Materials (6th Ed.) with Mary Ellen O’Connell and Dick Scott (Foundation Press 2010). She continues to write on accountability, both state and corporate, for human rights violations as well as on other human rights, international criminal law and global environmental issues. In 2011 she was a Democracy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and in 2012 she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Botswana.
Stephen Holmes
Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1976, Holmes (b. 1948) taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan Universities before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1978. He next moved to Harvard University's Department of Government, where he stayed until 1985, the year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago where he taught, in both the Political Science Department and the Law School, until 1997. From 1997-2000, Holmes was Professor of Politics at Princeton University. In 2000, he moved to New York University School of Law where he is currently Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Center on Law and Security. At the University of Chicago, Holmes was Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe. At Chicago and NYU he also served and as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review (1993-2003). In addition, he has also been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe (1994-96).
Holmes' research centers on the history of European liberalism, the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism, and the difficulty of combating international Salafi terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the 1991-92 academic year. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003-2005 for his work on Russian legal reform. Besides numerous articles on the history of political thought, democratic and constitutional theory, state-building in post-communist Russia, and the war on terror, his publications include: Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984); Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993); Passions and Constraint: The Theory of Liberal Democracy (1995); The Cost of Rights, coauthored, with Cass Sunstein (1998); and Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (2007).
Suzanne Last Stone
University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
Director, Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. She has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and also has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, Hebrew University Law, and Tel Aviv Law. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University Law School and was a Danforth Fellow in 1974 in Jewish History and Classical Religions at Yale University. Before joining the Cardozo faculty, Stone clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. In addition to teaching courses in Jewish Law and Political Thought and Jewish Law and American Legal Theory, she currently teaches Federal Courts and Law, Religion and the State.
Professor Stone is the co-editor-in-chief of Diné Israel, a peer review journal of Jewish law, co-edited with Tel Aviv Law School. She is also on the editorial boards of the Jewish Quarterly Review and ofHebraic Political Studies. She is a member of the board of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, the Center for Ethics of Yeshiva University, and the International Summer School in Religion and Public Life.
Professor Stone writes and lectures on the intersection of Jewish thought, legal theory, and the humanities. Her publications include: "In Pursuit of the Counter-text: The Turn to the Jewish Legal Model in Contemporary American Legal Theory," (Harvard Law Review); "The Jewish Conception of Civil Society," in Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton University Press); "Feminism and the Rabbinic Conception of Justice" in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University); and “Rabbinic Legal Magic” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities). Her work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic.
