Yale University – Linsly Chittenden Hall, Room 101

63 High Street, New Haven, CT 06520

Speaker Biographies

Hooshang Amirahmadi, PhD is a professor of Urban Planning & Policy Development and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Rutgers University. He is founder and president of the American Iranian Council, the founder of the Center for Iranian Research and Analysis, and president of Caspian Associates, Inc. . He has served as chair and graduate director of his department at the Bloustein School and as the University Coordinator of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program. He was a candidate for President in the Ninth Presidential Election in Iran in June 2005, but the conservative and religious Guardian Council disqualified him for his American citizenship and democratic platform. Dr. Amirahmadi is the author of four books, editor of 10 books and 16 conference proceedings on US-Iran relations.

Andrew Apostolou is the Senior Program Manager for Iran at Freedom House. Freedom House is an independent nongovernmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world. Freedom is possible only in democratic political systems in which the governments are accountable to their own people; the rule of law prevails; and freedoms of expression, association, and belief, as well as respect for the rights of minorities and women, are guaranteed. Apostolou is M.A. (Cantab), M.Sc. (LSE) and D.Phil (Oxon).

Roya Boroumand holds a history doctorate from the Sorbonne (France) and specializes in contemporary Iran. Roya is the co-founder and executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran and is currently working on an Internet-based project to promote human rights education in Iran. She has co-authored several articles on the political situation in Iran and has researched and wrote about women rights and family law in North Africa.

Patrick Clawson is the Deputy Director for Research at The Washington Institute for Near Policy in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of twenty-four books and monographs, including Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (with Michael Rubin) and Getting Ready for a Nuclear Ready Iran (Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, 2005, edited with Henry Sokolski). Dr. Clawson has authored more than seventy articles,appears frequently on television and radio, and has published op-ed articles in major newspapers.

Irwin Cotler currently serves as a Canadian Member of Parliament and is the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. As Minister of Justice, he tabled Canada's first-ever National Justice Initiative Against Racism, in parallel with the government's National Action Plan Against Racism. Cotler has worked with a group of international jurists to indict Iranian President Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide under the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention. He is also a professor, scholar, lawyer, and activist. He is also a professor of human rights law (on leave) at McGill University.

Gregory Gordon is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Dakota. Previously he worked with the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the first international post-Nuremberg prosecutions of radio and print media executives for incitement to genocide. In 2003, he joined the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations, where he helped investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals and modern human rights violators. Professor Gordon has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR and Radio France Internationale as an expert on war crimes prosecution and has lectured on that subject at the U.S. Army J.A.G. School and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library.

Malvina Halberstam, Professor of Law Cardozo since 1976. Her specialties include International law, terrorism, criminal procedure.  Professor Halberstam is a member of Cardozo's founding faculty and served as a counselor on international law for the US Department of State, Office of the Legal Advisor. As counselor, she supervised the State Department's comments on what became the Restatement of U.S. Foreign Relations Law (Third) and headed the US delegation in the negotiations on the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, adopted in Rome in 1988. She is coauthor of Women's Legal Rights: International Covenants an Alternative to the E.R.A..? She is a member of the American Law Institute, Advisory Committee of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security, and the boards of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.

Dr. Liora Hendelman-Baavur is a research fellow of the Center for Iranian Studies (CIS) at Tel Aviv University. She teaches courses in modern Iranian history and media of the Middle East. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on gender representations in Iranian popular culture and the printed press during the 1960s and 1970s. She is a co-editor of Iran-Pulse, overviews on Iranian current affairs, published by the CIS. Her current research focuses on the use of modern communication technologies in Iran.

Mehrangiz Kar is an Iranian journalist and one of the most celebrated activists in the history of women’s movement in Iran. In 2001, she was convicted for charges of acting against national security and disseminating propaganda against the Islamic Regime. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and was also based at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2002, she received the National Endowment for Democracy's Democracy Award presented by First Lady Laura Bush, and also the Ludovic Trarieux Prize in recognition of her life’s work.

Meir Litvak is a senior researcher at the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University and a senior lecturer in its Middle Eastern History Department. Having received his doctorate at Harvard University Litvak specializes in the study of Iranian History, Palestinian affairs and Arab anti-Semitism and perceptions of the Holocaust.

David Menashri is Director of Center for Iranian Studies and Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and Dean of the University's Special Programs Division. He has been a Visiting Fulbright scholar at Princeton University and Cornell University. His research focuses on the social and political history of modern Iran, education and modernization in the Middle East, Shi`i political thought and Central Asian affairs. Menashri is the author of numerous books and published papers on Iranian politics.

Saeed Paivandi is a Professor of Sociology at Paris-8 University and is a Leading Iran Expert. He is the author of “Discrimination and Intolerance in Iran’s Textbooks,” a report that revealed the prejudice deeply ingrained in the textbooks that make up the core of Iran’s school curriculum. He is one of the few Western scholars to specialize in Iran's post-revolutionary education system, and has contributed greatly to studies in this area.

Tom Parker is the Executive Director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. He is the former CEO of the Halo Partnership Consulting Firm which has designed and executed transitional justice projects for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Darfur Peace and Development Organization (DPDO).

Michael Rubin is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Senior Lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Editor of the Middle East Quarterly (a publication of the Middle East Forum). Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a Country Director for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, from which he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Charles Small is the Director for the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). He received a Doctorate of Philosophy (D.Phil), St. Antony’s College, Oxford Univeristy. He lectures on the Ethics, Politics & Economics Programs at Yale University.