General Public

Dr. Anna Kruglova is Lecturer of Terrorism Studies at the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. Anna has a PhD in International studies from Queen’s University Belfast. She also holds an MA in International Conflict Studies from King’s College London and MSc in Security Studies from UCL.

Her research interests are focusing on terrorist propaganda, and she is particularly interested in exploring the role of Internet, media, and social media in the recruitment process and radicalisation. Currently, Anna’s interests also expanded to the far right (especially in Russia and post-Soviet space) and the role of disinformation and misinformation in international relations.

Organized by the Program on Peace and Development at Yale University, MADE (Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era), and the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto

with panelists
Arman Tatoyan, Ph.D. (Law), Professor, Chair of the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice (HRSJ) Program, American University of Armenia
Armen Marsoobian, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Southern Connecticut State University
Karnig Kerkonian, J.D., founding partner, Kerkonian Dajani LLP; Armenian delegation to the ICJ
Tamar Hayrikyan, J.D., Clinical Supervisor, University Network for Human Rights

The European Studies Council and the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale present a talk by Dr. Juliana Cesario Alvim Gomes (Central European University; Austria / Federal University of Minas Gerais; Brazil) on “Gender in the Courtroom: Overlooked Factors in Decision-Making and Their Impact on Rights Adjudication.”

Lunch at 11:45am ET, talk at 12:00pm ET
Part of the European & Russian Studies Community Lunch Seminar Series
Co-Sponsored by the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies

Juliana Cesario Alvim Gomes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Legal Studies at Central European University (CEU) in Austria. Her main fields of research are human rights and constitutional law, on topics such as gender and sexuality, social mobilization and courts, equality and difference, and strategic litigation for human rights.

Before joining CEU, she was an assistant professor at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where she also coordinated the Human Rights Clinic.

She is the co-chair of the Brazilian Chapter of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-s) and co-hosts a weekly podcast on the Brazilian Supreme Court and Constitution.

For the last decade, Juliana has litigated for human rights before Brazilian and international courts. Since 2018, she is a legal consultant for the Center for Reproductive Rights on issues such as abortion and maternal health in Brazil.

The Yale Baltic Studies Program presents a talk on “Latvia’s Jewish Cultures before the Catastrophe” featuring Baltic Studies Juris Padegs Associate Research Scholar, Dr. Iveta Leitane.

Between two world wars, the Republic of Latvia, could be considered a center of intense cultural semiosis. The cultural life of Latvian Jews at the beginning of the 20th century until the Holocaust was vibrant, diverse and enriched by international contacts. Latvian Jewish literature was published in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Latvian and German, and included rabbinic and philosophical works. Visual arts and scholarship across disciplines of the humanities flourished in conditions of close relationship with the Jewish cultural life in Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, and Poland, revealing various levels of ‘own’ and ‘foreign’ elements and presenting a semiosis brimming with tension. Jewish cultures in Latvia assimilated critical and post-critical impulses from their own and surrounding culture and scholarship to varying degrees, thereby actively interpreting it and creating competing cultural models. A case study into this corner of European Jewish culture before the Catastrophe explores Jewish “cultural alliances” in Latvia: leftist ideas with various justifications, different branches of Zionism and territorialism, and clashing ideas about Judaism and Yidishkeyt.

Iveta Leitane had been Research Associate at the Department of Humanities, University of Latvia, in Riga, where she as a part of a research team just completed an intricate project on Gastropoetics in the Yiddish literature in Latvia. Previously Dr. Leitane taught in the capacity of Associate Professor at the Department of Theology, University of Latvia. Iveta Leitane is permanently affiliated with the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Latvia. In the intervening years she had been a Visiting Fellow and Research Associate at the Universities of Tubingen, Cologne, Bonn, Leipzig, Marburg, Princeton, Paris (GHI, EPHE) and Ružomberok. Iveta Leitane completed her Ph.D. at the University of Tubingen, Germany. Her dissertation examined the role different components of religion(s) played in the construction of national identity in the 19th and 20th centuries in Latvia. Dr. Leitane’s work focuses on Marburg Neo-Kantianism and the Jewish thought and culture in Baltics and Circumbaltics. She has published widely in the field of Judaic Studies, Religious Studies, Philosophy of Religion and Comparative Literature. She also has a long-standing interest in intellectual resistance movements in East and West. At Yale Dr. Leitane will complete her study, titled Latvia at the Crossroads of European Jewish Cultures: Mimesis, Difference, and Rapprochement.

Lunch will be provided.

Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, and CEO/Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. Janine was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre and post invasion, the Arab Spring, and finally Syria. Her field work for her most recent book took her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her their highest non fiction prize, the Blake Dodd. Janine served as a Senior Fellow and Professor at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018-2022 where she taught two human rights courses which looked at eight different conflicts in depth: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. She also taught a course at Yale in Reporting War for Humanitarians. In 2016, CNN made a short video about her life and work when the International Women’s’ Media Foundation gave her their prestigious Courage in Journalism Prize.

For her most recent project, Janine founded and directs The Reckoning Project, a transitional justice organization that trains researchers in Ukraine to collect testimonies that can be used in court. Through her work as a conflict journalist, Janine has experienced firsthand the frustration when testimonies collected directly from victims are inadmissible in courts. So, in partnership with Peter Pomerantsev, she’s created a team of legal experts and journalists to bridge the gap between journalism and justice.

With the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is worth taking stock of the status of various efforts to pursue justice for international crimes. Di Giovanni, whose organization The Reckoning Project supports testimony collection and preservation, will address the success, challenges, and opportunities in this realm

With support of the Program on Peace and Development, the Genocide Studies Program and the Schell Center for International Human Rights