Volume Editors

Human Rights Conversations

Volume Editors

1. William Paul Simmons is the Founding Director of the Human Rights Practice program and Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. He has more than 25 years of experience as a human rights educator and researcher, receiving numerous awards for his teaching, research, community service, and diversity initiatives. He previously taught at Arizona State University where he was the Founding Director of the MA Program in Social Justice and Human Rights. Simmons’ scholarship, teaching, and activism focus on working collaboratively with marginalized groups to advance their human rights. He has worked with vulnerable communities in more than a dozen countries including Bangladesh, Tanzania, Niger, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, The Gambia, Senegal, China, Mexico, and the United States. His books include Joyful Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other (Cambridge UP, 2011), and Binational Human Rights: The U.S.-Mexico Experience (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).  He is currently finishing up two book projects, 1) as lead editor of a radical new textbook called Human Rights Conversations: An Introduction to Human Rights Practice (Routledge) and 2) the monograph The Ignorances of Human Rights.  

2. Rhona Smith, Newcastle University, Author of International Human Rights, 11th edition, (Oxford UP, 2025), Text and Materials on International Human Rights Law, 4th ed (Routledge 2020). UN Special Rapporteur (Cambodia) 2015-2021. Smith has extensive experience training human rights scholars and activists in China and Southeast Asia.

3. Leonard Hammer is the holder of the Lakin Chair for the Holocaust, Human Rights, and Comparative Genocide at the University of Arizona’s Center for Judaic Studies. He has written articles about cultural heritage protection, human rights, and international law. His books include A Foucauldian Approach to International Law: Descriptive Thoughts for Normative Issues (Routledge, 2007), The International Human Right to Freedom of Conscience: Some Suggestions for Its Development and Application (Routledge, 2017), and The Contest and Control of Jerusalem’s Holy Sites: A Historical Guide to Legality, Status, and Ownership (co-authored with Marshall J. Breger, Cambridge University Press, 2023). He  has co-edited a number of books on holy places and on human rights. Leonard has worked for the Open Society Foundation to develop human rights programming in former USSR countries, and on a variety of human rights projects for NGOs around the world. Leonard also co-created the wholly online Human Rights Practice graduate degree at the University of Arizona in 2016-17, a project-based degree involving NGOs and guest lecturers from around the world. 
4. Devorah Wainer, Honorary Associate, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney.  Wainer’s research interests include refugee rights, voices of the marginalized, and transitional justice
5. Sheila B. Keetharuth is a human rights defender from Mauritius who has worked and travelled in mainland Africa for nearly three decades. She is a committed human rights advocate having extensive experience in research, advocacy, litigation and training in Africa. Ms Keetharuth was appointed as the first Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea in October 2012. From 2014 to 2016, she also served as a member of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea. Until 30 June 2012, Ms Keetharuth was the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA), a pan-African NGO based in Banjul, The Gambia. After reading for an LLM in International Human Rights Law and Civil Liberties at the University of Leicester (UK), Ms Keetharuth was called to the Bar in Mauritius in January 1997. Her particular interests are: human rights and business, extractive industries and litigation to strengthen the African human rights system. In 2010, the Madrid Bar Association awarded her a Medal of Honour for her human rights work on the African continent. Since May 2014, Ms Keetharuth is an expert member of the Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

6. Elisa Marchi, PhD, LLM is the director and   Associate Professor of Practice  of the Human Rights Practice Program. Dr. Marchi is currently the Director for the Indigenous Rights & Protected Areas Initiative and a Professor of Practice at the James E. Rogers College of Law, Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of legal studies, conservation, international human rights, multiculturalism, and collective rights. Dr. Marchi holds a Master of Laws (LLM), graduating cum laude from the University of Florence (Italy), a Master’s in Human Rights and Conflict Management at the University of Sant’Anna, Pisa (Italy) and a Ph.D. in Legal Studies at the University of Florence.  Dr. Marchi was a visiting scholar at the University of Kansas (U.S), Brunel University (London), Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Oaxaca, Mexico) and the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona (U.S). She has worked for several NGOs and legal clinics as a consultant and researcher in a vast range of topics including minority and indigenous rights, environmental rights, transitional justice, the rule of law, democracy in the Middle East and North African region, women rights and inmates’ rights. Recently, she was a visiting human rights lawyer at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Washington D.C.). For three years (2021–2024), she served as an external legal advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

7. Dr. Francesca Parente is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution. She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation on compliance with rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was awarded Best Dissertation by the American Political Science Association Human Rights Section in 2020. Prior to her appointment at CNU, Dr. Parente was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Perry World House, the global policy hub of the University of Pennsylvania.

8. Ivana Radačić is a human rights scholar and contemplative practitioner based in Croatia. She is Research Advisor at the Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences in Zagreb. Her research and teaching areas are human rights; gender, sexuality and the law; and spirituality, well-being, and human rights. She has extensive practical experience, having served as a member of the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls and as a lawyer at the European Court of Human Rights. A certified Kundalini yoga teacher and graduate of a four-year integrative body-oriented psychotherapy program, she is also trained in multiple therapeutic and healing modalities. Through her research, teaching, workshops, ceremonies, women’s circles, music, and dance, Ivana fosters a bridge between social activism and spirituality, guiding individuals toward embodied awareness, collective healing, and transformative justice.

9. Semere Kesete, Human rights activist and former political prisoner from Eritrea.  Research interests include: civil and political rights, refugees, human trafficking, the Horn of Africa.