Short Biographies of Speakers, Panelists, Moderators, and the Director

*Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile, is Under-Secretary-General for UN Women. Dr. Bachelet brings to this critical position a history of dynamic global leadership, highly honed political skills and uncommon ability to create consensus and focus among UN Agencies and many partners in both the public and private sectors. In 2000, Michelle Bachelet was named Minister of Health in President Ricardo Lagos’ administration, where she headed an organization with more than 70,000 workers and a nationwide network of public health services that also supervises, either directly or indirectly, autonomous municipal health services and the private healthcare system. In 2002, President Lagos appointed Dr. Bachelet to head of the Defence Ministry. During her tenure, Chile’s rules about obligatory military service were modified in key ways, the role of the Ministry and the government in military affairs was strengthened, and equal-opportunity policies were instituted for women in the military, the Carabineros Police and the Investigations Police. In 2006, she became the first woman to be elected President in the history of the Republic of Chile and held this office for four years, serving her full term, which ended on 11 March 2010 with the greatest approval from people in the history of Chile. In April 2010, Dr. Bachelet founded and headed Dialoga Foundation, as a way to contribute to and support a renovation of ideas, action, and leadership in Chile. She is trained as a pediatrician and epidemiologist.

Joseph Betancourt, M.D., M.P.H. is Director of the Disparities Solutions Center, Senior Scientist at the Institute for Health Policy, and Program Director for Multicultural Education at the Multicultural Affairs Office at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He is also Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Betancourt's primary interests include cross-cultural medicine, minority recruitment into the health professions, and minority health/health policy research. His recent publications include "Cultural competence and health care disparities: key perspectives and trends” in Health Affairs (co-authored in 2005), "Barriers to health promotion and disease prevention in the Latino population” in Clinical Cornerstone (co-authored in 2004), and “The Institute of Medicine report ‘Unequal Treatment’: implications for academic health centers” in Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine (co-authored in 2004).

Joao Biehl is Professor of Anthropology and Co-director of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy at Princeton University. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, Professor Biehl was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. His publications include, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton University Press 2007) and Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

John Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is Director of the Pluralism, Politics, and Religion Initiative. In 2001 and 2009, he was Professeur invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris and in 2010 he is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1995-1996, a Carnegie Scholar in 2005-2006, and is recipient of the Leverhulme Trust Award, London School of Economics. He is author of many books, including, most recently, Can Islam Be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State (Princeton University Press, 2009). The New Anthropology of Islam and Framing Muslims across Western Europe (senior editor on collaborative volume) are forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Elof Axel Carlson is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology of Stony Brook University as well as a American geneticist and noted historian of Science. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, San Diego State University, and Tougaloo College. He was also a McMurrin visiting professorship at the University of Utah. His recent books include, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001), Mendel's Legacy: The Origin of Classical Genetics (2004), Times of Triumph, Times of Doubt: Science And the Battle for Public Trust (2006); Neither Gods Nor Beasts: How Science is Changing Who We Think We Are (2008).

Sumita S. Chakravarty is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. She joined the faculty of New School in 1988 and was Chair of the department from 2000 to 2008. She also taught in the English department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and lectured at Lucknow University, India. Her books include National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 and The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen. She was a Member of Fulbright National Screening Committee 2009-2010 and recipient of the Social Science Research Council Advanced Research Grant, 1996-97.

Paisley Currah is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York. He works in the intersections of political theory, gender and sexuality studies, studies in law and society, LGBT studies, and transgender studies. He has widely written on the transgender rights movement. His current work investigates state constructions of sex for the purposes of recognition and national projects that use gender as a distributive mechanism. He recently co-authored  “The State of Transgender Rights in the United States of America,” a working paper written for and presented at a meeting of the Global Dialog on Sexual Health and Well Being, organized by the four regional National Sexuality Resource Centers and  “The Transgender Rights Imaginary,” published in Feminist and Queer Legal Theory.

Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is also in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College. Her research and teaching interests revolve around two basic areas, Hinduism and mythology. Her courses in mythology address themes in cross-cultural expanses, such as death, dreams, evil, horses, sex, and women; her courses in Hinduism cover a broad spectrum that, in addition to mythology, considers literature, law, gender, and psychology. Her books include The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press 2009) and Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (University of Chicago Press 1999).

Joseph Fins, M.D. is Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College where he serves as Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry.  Dr. Fins is also Director of Medical Ethics at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Rockefeller University and a Senior Attending Physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital. A recipient of a Robert Wood  Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, Dr. Fins has also received a Soros Open Society Institute Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Award, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Visiting Fellowship and support from the Dana and Buster Foundations. He was appointed by President Clinton to The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and currently serves on The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law by gubernatorial appointment.

David Garland is Professor of Sociology and Law at New York University. He is widely considered one of the world's leading sociologists of crime and punishment, joined the New York University School of Law faculty in 1997. He was previously on the faculty of Edinburgh University's Law School, where he had taught since 1979, being appointed to a personal chair in 1992. At New York University School of Law , he also holds a joint appointment as professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches graduate classes in social theory and an undergraduate course in criminology. He is the author of several prize-winning studies, including Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory, which won distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and Punishment and Welfare: The History of Penal Strategies which won the International Society of Criminology's prize for best study over a five-year period. His most recent book is The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, was published by University of Chicago Press in February 2001 and has already been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Chinese. Garland was a Visiting Reader at Leuven University, Belgium in 1983, a Davis Fellow in Princeton University's history department in 1984-85, and a Visiting Professor at Boalt Law School, U.C. Berkeley, in 1985 and 1988. In 1993 he was awarded the Sellin-Glueck prize by the American Society of Criminology for distinguished scholarly contributions to criminology by a non-American scholar.

Susan Greenhalgh is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. The central concern of her recent work has been to understand Chinese projects of modernity/globality (state efforts to transform China's "backward masses" into the modern workers and citizens needed to make China a prosperous, globally prominent nation) and their effects on China's society, culture, politics, and global standing. Her empirical focus has been the state's project to optimize the size and "quality" of China's population by limiting all couples to one child. Aside from the basic policy of economic reform and opening up, no policy has been more consequential to reform-era China than the one-child policy. Her interests in the social dimensions of China's global rise are reflected in three recent books: Population and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press, 2010), Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (University of California Press, 2008), Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (with Edwin A. Winckler, Stanford University Press, 2005).

Michele Goodwin is Everett Fraser Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota. She holds joint appointments at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Professor Goodwin served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley. She was honored with a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Griffith University in Australia. Prior to law teaching, Goodwin was a Gilder-Lehrman post-doctoral fellow at Yale University. Her writings on baby markets, judicial formalism, law and status, organ procurement, assisted reproduction, reproductive politics, family immunity in tort law, and patient negligence, appear in journals published by the University of Chicago, University of Michigan, George Washington University, Duke University, University of Virginia, University of Alabama, Barnard College, and many others. Her books include Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Human Body Parts (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Baby Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Bernard E. Harcourt is Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, criminal law and procedure, and criminology. He is author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007) and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001).

Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Professor Kahn teaches in the areas of constitutional law and theory, international law, cultural theory and philosophy. Before coming to Yale in 1985, he clerked for Justice White in the United States Supreme Court and practiced law in Washington, D.C., during which time he was on the legal team representing Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice. He is the author of Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional Theory; The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America; The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship; Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear; Putting Liberalism in its Place; Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil; and Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty.

Siddharth Kara is an Affiliate of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program, and a Fellow with the Carr Center Initiative to Stop Human Trafficking. He is also the author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, the first of three books he is writing on the subjects of human trafficking and contemporary slavery. Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, he has traveled to twenty countries across six continents to research these crimes, interviewing over five hundred slaves of all kinds, witnessing firsthand the sale of humans into slavery, and confronting some of those who trafficked and exploited them. Sex Trafficking provides a rare business, economic, and legal analysis of the global sex trafficking industry, and recommends legal and tactical measures to help abolish slavery once and for all. Kara currently advises the United Nations and several governments on antislavery policy and law, and he continues to research slavery around the world. In addition to several nonprofit board positions, Kara serves on the committee founded by Kirk Douglas that is lobbying the US Congress to provide an official apology for pre-bellum slavery. In 2009, he was selected as a Fellow for the acclaimed TED India conference. Kara has also written an award winning feature film screenplay on human trafficking set for production in 2011. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.

Thomas Walter Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California where he writes about and teaches European cultural history. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books. His writings about the dead include " Unquiet Bodies” in the London Review of Books; "Places of the dead in modernity" in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); "The Dead Body and Human Rights," in The Body (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and is currently completing a book on The Work of the Dead.

Claudio Lomnitz is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He serves as editor of the journal Public Culture. He is currently working on the historical anthropology of crisis and recently published Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the 16th to the 21st centuries. His other books include Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005).

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. In recent years he has been focusing on race. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and four books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell University, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. His most recent book, Contract and Domination  (Polity Press, 2007), is co-authored with Carole Pateman, who wrote The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), and it seeks to bring the two “contracts” together. He is currently working on a collection of his Caribbean essays, Radical Theory, Caribbean  Reality: Race, Class, and Social Domination. Before joining Northwestern, Charles Mills taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was a UIC Distinguished Professor.

Afsaneh Najmabadi is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her last book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. She is currently working on Sex in Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Iran, and on Genus of Sex: How Jins Became Sex in Iran. Afsaneh and a team of Qajar historians received a NEH grant to develop a comprehensive digital archive and website that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1785 – 1925) in Iran.

Pilar Ossorio is Associate Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Program Faculty in the Graduate Program in Population Health at the UW. Prior to taking her position at UW, she was Director of the Genetics Section at the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association, and taught as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School. Dr. Ossorio is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS), a member of the editorial board of the American Journal of Bioethics, chair of an NHGRI advisory group on ethical issues in large scale sequencing, and a member of UW’s institutional review board for health sciences research. She is a past member of AAAS’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, a past member of the National Cancer Policy Board (Institute of Medicine), and has been a member or chair of several working groups on genetics and ethics. Recent articles include “About Face: Forensic Genetic Profiling for Race and Visible Traits,” J. Law, Medicine & Ethics (in press) and “Race and Genetics: Controversies in Biomedical, Behavioral, and Forensic Sciences,” American Psychologist (with Troy Duster, 2005).

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist and Visiting Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. She co-founded the Women's Therapy Centre in London and New York. She has been a consultant for The World Bank, the NHS and Unilever and was co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Orbach was a Visiting Scholar at the New School for Social Research in New York and was a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics for 10 years. She is currently chair of the Relational School in the UK, is convener of Anybody, an organization that campaigns for body diversity and is a founder member of ANTIDOTE, working for emotional literacy and Psychotherapists and Counselors for Social Responsibility. For 10 years Susie Orbach had a column in The Guardian newspaper on emotions in public and private life. Her books include, Bodies (Picador, 2009), On Eating (Penguin Books Ltd, 2002), and The Impossibility of Sex (Scribner, 1999).

Michael G. Peletz is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. His teaching and research interests focus on social and cultural theory; gender and sexual diversity; law, discipline, and disorder; and the cultural politics of religion -- especially Islam -- and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. His recent books include Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times (2009) and have focused on gender, sexuality, and body politics across Asia (2007), and on the ways that Islamic courts in Malaysia are involved in struggles to define the role of Islam with respect to the maintenance of national sovereignty and variously construed projects of modernity and civil society in an age of globalization (2002).

Adriana Petryna is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009), Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices (Duke University Press, 2006) and Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, a multi-sited ethnography of emergent genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India (2006) and Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities (2007).

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of South Asian History in the Women’s Studies Department at Barnard College. Her research and teaching interests are in the history of anticolonialism; gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology, human rights, and social theory. Her recent book is The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (University of California Press, 2009).

Rayna Rapp is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Her areas of research are gender, reproduction, health and culture, and science and technology in the U.S. and Europe. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (Routledge, 2000). Her articles and chapters include "Genetic Citizenship” and "Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory" in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

Renata Salecl teaches law at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, her native country. She has been the Centennial Professor at the department of law at the London School of Economics. She is a frequent visitor to Cardozo, teaching and collaborating on conferences.  A member of several think tanks, including the Remarque Institute, she works on developing policy changes in women's rights, maternity leave, and in vitro fertilization in Slovenia. Her many books and articles include (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, published in 1998 by Verso and translated into German, Russian, Spanish, French, Korean, and Serbo-Croation. Her most recent book, On Anxiety, published by Routledge in 2004, has been translated into Portuguese and Turkish. Salecl's research projects include researching China’s developing cloning industry.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor’s Professor in Medical Anthropology and the head of the Doctoral Program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the Director of Organs Watch and co-founder of the Organs Watch Project. Her research, writings, and teaching focus on violence, suffering, and premature death as these are experienced on the margins and peripheries of the late modern world – a multi-sited, ethnographic, and medical human rights oriented study of the global traffic in humans (living and dead) for their organs to serve the needs and desires of international transplant patients. A concern with the role of new markets and their impact on the transfer of transplant technologies resulted in the book, Commodifying Bodies, co-edited with Loic Wacquant (2002, Sage). Her forthcoming book is A World Cut in Two: Global Justice and the Traffic in Organs (University of California Press).

Susan Schweik is Professor and Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recent recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence. A former Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education for Disability Studies at U.C. Berkeley, she has been involved with the development of disability studies at Berkeley for nine years. She was co-coordinator of the Ed Roberts Fellowships in Disability Studies post-doctoral program at Berkeley (coordinated by the Institute for Urban and Regional Development). She has taught and co-taught undergraduate courses in Disability and Literature, Discourses of Disability, The Disability Rights Movement, Disability and Digital Storytelling, Psychiatric Disability, Literature and Medicine, and Race, Ethnicity and Disability, among others, and graduate courses in Body Theory and Disability Studies and Advanced Disability Studies. Her other teaching and research interests include twentieth century poetry, late nineteenth century American literature, women's studies and gender theory, urban studies, war literature and children's literature. She is a recipient of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award. Her books include, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (History of Disability) (New York University Press, 2009).

Edward Stein is Vice Dean, Professor of Law, and Director of the Program in Family Law, Policy, and Bioethics at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Before joining the Cardozo faculty, Professor Stein taught in the philosophy departments at Yale University, Mount Holyoke College, and New York University. In 2001-02, he clerked for Judge Dolores Sloviter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He is the author of numerous articles and books on legal, philosophical, and scientific topics, including The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (Oxford University Press, 1999). His current research focuses on issues at the intersection of family law and sexual orientation, gender and the law.

Winnifred F. Sullivan is Associate Professor and Director of the Law and Religion Program at the University of Buffalo Law School. She studies the intersection of religion and law in the modern period, particularly the phenomenology of modern religion as it is shaped in its encounter with law. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, 2005) and Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton, 2009). During the 2010-2011 academic year, she will be a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where she will also be supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Carole S. Vance is Associate Clinical Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. For the past ten years, she has directed a program on sexuality, gender, health and human rights, which advances policy-relevant scholarship and facilitates exchange between researchers and advocates on sexual health and rights issues. Dr. Vance currently is involved in research on trafficking into forced prostitution, also known as sex trafficking, with particular focus on the ways in which ethnographic research can inform policy, as well as health and rights interventions. Dr. Vance edited the landmark collection, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (HarperCollins, 1993), and is completing the edited volume, Ethnography and Policy: What Do We Know about Trafficking? (2007). In 2005, Dr. Vance received the David R. Kessler Award for lifetime contributions to studies of sexuality.

About the Director

Dr. Arien Mack is Alfred and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research, is the founder and director of the Social Research conference series and all other Social Research projects. She also continues to teach and run a research lab investigating visual perception. Her publications include more than 60 articles, and the book Inattentional Blindness (1998), as well as Death and the American Experience (1973), Technology and the Rest of Culture (1997), and Humans and Other Animals (1995), all three of which were issues of Social Research republished as books with university presses. She has been the editor of Social Research since 1970. For information about how you can help support the Center, please contact Dr. Arien Mack.