Professor Victoria Sanford is having a notable year—which is
particularly remarkable considering her career has long been
distinguished by its impressive accomplishments. The chair of the
Lehman College Anthropology Department and director of the
Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies, she was recently
awarded her third J. William Fulbright Scholarship and will also
publish two new books.
Victoria Sanford,
Sofia Álvarez-Arenas y Kathleen Dill
Guatemala:
Violencia sexual
y Genocidio
For the next two summers, Sanford will be traveling to Colombia
on the U.S. Fulbright Scholar award to develop a curriculum on
transitional justice at the Universidad Libre in Bogota. “It’s exciting
as an anthropologist to be working with legal faculty, prosecutors,
and attorneys,” she said. Transitional justice employs judicial and
non-judicial means as a way to redress massive human rights
abuses. It has been a way to obtain justice in countries that are
transitioning from long-term conflict and state repression.
“In developing a transitional justice curriculum for
Universidad Libre, she hopes to create a program
that allows participants to make a difference in the
future of a democratic Colombia. “I’ve watched
my colleagues in Guatemala do just that and it’s
profound,” said Sanford.
Sanford is a human rights activist and transitional justice advocate
in Guatemala. In May her book Guatemala: Violencia Sexual y
Genocidio was published by F&G Editores in Guatemala. It is a
Spanish language account of the massacre of the Ixil Maya village
of Acul and the latest of her books to examine transitional justice,
human rights, and genocide in the Central American republic. Her
other books on the topic include Buried Secrets: Truth and Human
Rights in Guatemala (2003) and Guatemala: Del Genocidio al
Feminicidio (2008, in Spain).
Photo by Julien Charlon
Prof. Victoria Sanford
Continues Her Work on Latin American Justice
20
Lehman Today
In addition, Sanford is the first of three editors of Gender Violence
in Peace and War: States of Complicity (to be published in
September 2016 by Rutgers University Press). It is a collection of
powerful essays about gender violence in nations such as Greece
and Iraq. The book’s co-editors are Lehman Adjunct Anthropology
Professor Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi, a doctoral student in
anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Some of the book’s chapters were presented by her colleagues
at the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies’ annual
conference in 2014.
At Universidad Libre in Bogota, Sanford will be working with
university law students, many of whom are the first in their families
to attend college. The Colombian government is expected, as of
this writing, to imminently sign a peace accord with FARC (the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) who has been waging
guerilla war against the Colombian government for more than
half a century. Sanford said she will be arriving in Colombia at “a
significant historical moment for the country.”
In developing a transitional justice curriculum for Universidad Libre,
she hopes to create a program that allows participants to make a
difference in the future of a democratic Colombia. “I’ve watched
my colleagues in Guatemala do just that and it’s profound,” she
said. “They have been able to make changes and bring human
rights violators to justice. The students in Colombia can make a
difference in the construction of justice and democracy in their
country.”
The Anthropology chair was awarded her
third Fulbright and will publish two books
this year, both about transitional justice.
Lehman Today
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