Working Group Members

Co-Chairs:

 Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
Professor of Sociology, Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego
Director, Social Innovation MA Program, University of San Diego

Austin works across a range of disciplines to explore the impact of technology, politics and culture have on social change. An early round of work focused on the anti-trafficking movement (From Human Trafficking to Human Rights (ed), Penn, 2013) social movement targets (What Slaveholders Think, Columbia, 2017), social movement technologies (The Good Drone, MIT Press, 2020), ethical dilemmas in peace and justice work (Wicked Problems (ed), Oxford, 2022), and the complexity of human rights narratives (Bonded, under review).

Austin’s current projects are focused on the role creativity and collaboration play in social change. In particular, he is interested in how people work together to imagine and create for an uncertain future. In this vein he is the Program Director in the Master of Arts in Social Innovation at the Kroc School, a “Free Radical Fellow” at the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network, a founding member of the Art Builds Artist Collective, and Co-Chair of the GLC Working Group on Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale University.

Anna Mae Duane 
Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Director, Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut

Anna Mae Duane is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Connecticut, and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. She teaches and writes in the fields of American Studies, African American Literature, and the Medical Humanities. She’s particularly interested in how definitions of youth and childhood shape culture and policy in ways that require the abdication of rights in order to claim care. She is the author or editor of six books including Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys who Grew Up to Change a Nation; Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies and Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900. Her public-facing scholarship includes publications in Salon.com, Slate.com and an ongoing podcast.

Members:

Sunil Amrith 
Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University

Sunil Amrith’s research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. His areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. Amrith is the recipient of the 2022 A.H. Heineken Prize for History, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. Amrith’s most recent book is Unruly Waters (Basic Books and Penguin UK), a history of the struggle to understand and control the monsoon in modern South Asia. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and was reviewed in Nature, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Review of Books. His previous book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013) was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2014, and was selected as an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 (Palgrave, 2006), as well as articles in journals including the American Historical Review, Past and Present, The Lancet and Economic and Political Weekly. Amrith serves on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Modern Asian Studies, and he is one of the series editors of the Princeton University Press book series, Histories of Economic Life. Amrith is currently writing “The Ruins of Freedom,” an environmental history of the modern world to be published W.W. Norton and Allen Lane, as well as in Chinese, Korean, Italian, Dutch, German, and French translations. Current collaborative projects include research with Professor David S. Jones (Harvard University) on the history of air pollution and health in India.

 Alice Baumgartner 
Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern California

Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses on 19th century North America. She received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and an M.Phil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. Her first book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War, published in 2020, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The book tells the story of the enslaved people who escaped to Mexico in the four decades leading up to the Civil War. Reconstructing that story – and its forgotten significance to slavery in the United States – took her to 28 archives in three countries. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Western Historical Quarterly, among others.

 Amb. (ret.) Luis C.deBaca 
Professor from Practice, University of Michigan Law School

Ambassador (ret.) Luis C.deBaca, ‘93, led U.S. government activities in the global fight against contemporary forms of slavery during the Obama administration. As Ambassador at Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, C.deBaca updated statutes created after the Civil War and through the 13th Amendment to develop the victim-centered approach to modern slavery that has become the global standard for combating human trafficking. In the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), C.deBaca investigated and prosecuted complex criminal cases, negotiated labor and human rights advances, and managed multi-million dollar grant portfolios combating slavery and sexual abuse. As one of the most decorated federal prosecutors in the U.S., he investigated and prosecuted cases of human trafficking, hate crimes, and police misconduct, as well as immigration, organized crime, and money laundering. He built his litigation record into policy, incorporating the voices of victims, workers, and the advocacy community into decision making. As principal DOJ drafter of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act and a member of the team that negotiated the United Nations’ anti-trafficking protocol, he helped to enshrine the “3P” anti-trafficking approach of prevention, protection, and prosecution in U.S. and international practice. Following his prosecution career, he served as Counsel to the House Committee on the Judiciary, where he handled issues of civil rights, immigration, and civil liberties, including revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the Obama Administration, he served as Director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons from 2009 to 2014 and as the Director of the Justice Department’s Office for Sex Offender Monitoring Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking from 2015 to 2017. After retiring from government service, C.deBaca was a Senior Fellow of Modern Slavery at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and served as a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and Lecturer of Architecture at Yale School of Architecture. He also was a 2017-2019 Soros Open Society Human Rights Fellow focusing on worker-led social responsibility, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. C.deBaca’s teaching and research interests include Criminal Law, Race & Slavery, Policing, Immigration, National Security, Labor, Indian Law, International Law, and Civil Rights. Current projects include an inquiry into the imprint of current and historical forms of slavery and involuntary servitude on the built environment, re-thinking business practices that incentivize the use of forced labor, and preparatory work toward a national slavery memorial in Washington, D.C.

Cara Daggett
Assistant Professor, Political Science, Virginia Tech

Cara Daggett is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. She researches the politics of energy and the environment, feminist studies of science and technology, and histories of empire. Her book, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2019), was awarded the Clay Morgan Award for best book in environmental political theory and the Yale H. Ferguson Book Award from the International Association Northeast and has been translated into multiple languages. Her work has been published in journals including Environmental Politics, Energy Research & Social Science, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She has also enjoyed public-facing writing, podcasting, and engagements with artists and architects around questions of energy - especially how human activities are organized and valued.

 May Farid
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Kroc School, University of San Diego

Dr. May Farid is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego. She studies the interaction between citizen groups and states, with a focus on policy influence under authoritarianism and, more recently, transnational advocacy. Her research explores how citizen groups shape state policies in a variety of contexts: grassroots NGO and INGO advocacy in China, cross-sector knowledge communities and local policy, and INGOs promoting global environmental governance in China’s outbound aid and investment. Another branch of her research studies NGO interventions to empower citizens in the global South, through programs that fight misinformation or promote social cohesion in India. Her work has been published in International Affairs, World Development, Studies in Comparative International Development, Voluntas, and the Journal of Chinese Political Science. Before joining the Kroc School, Dr. Farid conducted research as a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions and taught at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. Outside academia, Dr. Farid ran an institutional capacity building program for rural grassroots NGOs in China for seven years, and conducted a four-year research project on development in ethnic minority regions for China’s leading government policy think-tank. 

Claudia Flores
Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Claudia Flores is a Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She was previously a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Chicago School of Law where she was Director of the Global Human Rights Clinic. Flores’s research and advocacy focuses on international human rights, issues of inequality and failures of good governance and rule of law. Prior to joining the faculty at University of Chicago, Flores served as United Nations legal advisor to the governments of East Timor and Zimbabwe in constitutional and legislative drafting processes. Previously, Flores managed a USAID-funded program to combat human trafficking in Indonesia. From 2004–2008, she was a staff attorney at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in the Women’s Rights Project. Flores was a recipient of the Skadden Arps Fellowship of the Skadden Foundation and law clerk to Judge Harry Pregerson in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She was also a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar and Sinsheimer Service Fellow at New York University School of Law where she earned her J.D. She received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago.

Talitha LeFlouria
Associate Professor of History and Fellow of the Mastin Gentry White Professorship in Southern History, University of Texas- Austin

Talitha L. LeFlouria earned her Ph.D. in US History at Howard University and has held positions with the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (National Park Service) and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, DC. Before joining the History department at The University of Texas at Austin, she worked as an Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University and as the Lisa Smith Discovery Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (UNC, 2015), the first history of Black, working-class incarcerated women in the post-Civil War period. This book received several awards including: the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians (2016), the Philip Taft Labor History Award from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations & Labor and Working-Class History Association (2016), the Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award from the Georgia Historical Society (2016), the Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities (2015), the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians (2015), and the Ida B. Wells Tribute Award from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (2015). She is currently finishing her second single-authored book, “Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block” (forthcoming from Beacon Press). The Carnegie Corporation supported this project with a prestigious Andrew Carnegie fellowship. In addition to her scholarly publications, LeFlouria writes for popular media outlets, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Root. Her research has also been profiled in Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine, Huffington Post, The Nation, and in several PBS documentaries including Slavery by Another Name.

Katrin Kinzelbach
Professor of International Politics of Human Rights, Institute of Political Science, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg

 Scott Moore
Practice Professor in Political Science

Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Scott Moore is a political scientist, university administrator, and former policymaker whose career focuses on China, sustainability, and emerging technology. As Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Moore works with faculty members from across the University to design, implement, and highlight innovative, high-impact global research initiatives in areas including sustainability and emerging technology.

Dr. Moore directs Penn Global’s four research and engagement fund programs, including those designed to support faculty-led projects in China, India, and Africa as well as its At-Risk Scholars Program. In addition, Dr. Moore conducts research as an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and The Water Center at Penn, and teaches in the Department of Political Science. His first book, Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines how climate change and other pressures affect the likelihood of conflict over water within countries. His latest, China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future (Oxford University Press, 2022), explores how shared ecological and technological challenges force us to re-envision China’s rise and its role in the world.

Prior to Penn, Dr. Moore was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change. Before entering public service, Dr. Moore was Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He was also awarded the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program fellowship, the Fulbright fellowship, and the Truman Scholarship.

His research and commentary on a wide range of environmental and international affairs issues has appeared in a range of leading scholarly journals and media outlets, including Nature, The China Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times. Dr. Moore holds doctoral and master’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton.

Sushma Raman
President & CEO of Heissing-Simons Foundation, Palo Alto

Ms. Raman is an interdisciplinary and experienced philanthropic leader, currently the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She brings over two decades of experience launching, scaling, and leading social justice and philanthropic programs and collaboratives, including helping build capabilities of grassroots human rights organizations and their leaders. She has also taught graduate courses in the public policy schools at UCLA, USC, Tufts Fletcher School, and Harvard Kennedy School. Ms. Raman is currently a Board Member at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and has been in her role at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy since 2015. Her work prior to that included time as a program officer and program manager at the Ford Foundation, where she launched and managed a $100 million global initiative to support emerging human rights and women’s funds globally, and experience as a program officer at the Open Society Foundation, where she launched and coordinated a portion of a $50 million grantmaking program supporting immigrant and refugee rights and the impact of welfare reform. Ms. Raman will return to California, where from 2007 to 2012 she led the Southern California Grantmakers Association as its President.

Melissa I. M. Torres
Argiro Fellow, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University

Dra. Melissa I. M. Torres is the Inaugural Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She was previously a Global Health Scholar and Assistant Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Research Lead for the Global Mental Health Division, which is comprised of the Anti-Human Trafficking Program and the Clinic for International Trauma Survivors. She has also served as the Director of the Human Trafficking Research Portfolio and Adjunct Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. She received her Masters of Social Work and PhD at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she is Adjunct Faculty, developed the university’s first course on human trafficking, and co-founded the college’s Latin American Initiative. Dr. Torres served as the Subject Matter Expert on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ healthcare professional’s response to human trafficking program, which developed the SOAR program. She served as the Deputy Director for the American Red Cross Latino Engagement Team during its founding year and currently serves as the human trafficking expert for various academic studies and programs in the U.S. and Latin America.