Working Group Members
The Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group at Yale University provides a platform for interaction for a diverse group of top scholars researching Modern Slavery and Trafficking to come together and explore opportunities of intellectual exchange and collaboration. Group members are experts on different dimensions of contemporary slavery and trafficking who share a commitment to big-picture thinking, rigorous scholarship, public engagement, and to carving out the policy relevance of their work. The group focus on transdiciplinary aspects of research on human trafficking and modern slavery that are key to its societal value, but rarely get discussed within existing networks focused on themes or topics. These issues include, but are not limited to: the links between scholarship, policy, and activism; methodologies for modern slavery research; the paucity of reliable data on contemporary forced labor; and opportunities for interdisciplinary cooperation. The Working Group fosters intellectual exchange between existing projects anchored within different disciplinary traditions and provides fertile ground to undertake new collaborative projects.
Working Group Facilitators
Dr Genevieve LeBaron is Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. Her current research focuses on the global business of forced labour and the politics and effectiveness of governance initiatives to combat it. Genevieve currently holds a UK Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leaders Grant (2016-2019, £275,434) for the project, ‘Understanding and Governing Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains.’ She has held visiting positions at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, the International Labour Organization (Geneva), Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, and Sciences Po, Paris. In 2015, Genevieve was awarded the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award by the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences for her research and policy work on forced labour. She is co-founder and Editor of openDemocracy.net’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. Her recent publications can be found here.
Jessica R. Pliley is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender History at Texas State University and holds a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University. She is the author of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Harvard, 2014) and editor of Global Anti-Vice Activism: Fighting Drink, Drugs, and ‘Immorality’ (Cambridge, 2016). She is the book review editor for the Journal of Women’s History. Dr. Pliley is a Fulbright specialist and serves on the advisory board of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project Trafficking, Smuggling and Illicit Migration in Gendered and Historical Perspective, c. 1870 – 2000. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her current research explores the long history of anti-trafficking movement from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. For more information please visit her website at jessicapliley.com.
Working Group Members
Jean Allain is Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia and Professor of International Law, Wilberforce Institute (WISE), University of Hull, UK. He serves as Special Adviser for Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest human rights organization. He received his PhD from the University of Geneva and clerked for the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. More recently, he offered expert testimony to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica about a case involving forced labor and slavery in Brazil. He has held major research grants from bodies including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK); the British Academy; the International Council for Canadian Studies; the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; and the Rockefeller Foundation. Professor Allain is a generalist of international law and a leading legal scholar on issues of slavery and human exploitation. In addition to numerous articles, his most recent books include: The Law and Slavery (Brill, 2015) and Slavery in International Law (Brill, 2013).
Kevin Bales exposed how modern slavery penetrates the global economy and flows into the things we buy by going undercover to meet slaves and slaveholders for his book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Disposable People was named by the Association of British Universities as one of “100 World-Changing Discoveries” and published in ten other languages. In 2001 he co-founded the NGO Free the Slaves, which has liberated thousands of slaves worldwide. Professor Bales is the Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham, CMG, FRSA; and Lead Author of the WalkFree Global Slavery Index. The film based on his work Slavery: A Global Investigation (HBO/BBC) won a Peabody and two Emmys. Dr. Bales has advised the US, British, Irish, Norwegian, and Nepali governments as well as the European Parliament on trafficking and slavery policy. His newest book, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World was published in January 2016. Check out his TED Talk.
Janie Chuang is a Professor of Law at American University’s Washington College of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of international law, human trafficking, and labor migration. Professor Chuang earned her J.D. at Harvard Law School. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of International Law, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the North Carolina Law Review, and have been cited in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Guardian, among others. Drawing on her expertise on human trafficking issues, Professor Chuang has served as an adviser to the United Nations, the International Labor Organization, and the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe. She has also served in leadership positions with the American Society of International Law and the International Law Association. Professor Chuang was a 2011-2012 Open Society Foundations Fellow. Prior to joining AUWCL, Chuang practiced with the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, representing foreign governments in international litigation/arbitration and pro bono clients in asylum and human rights cases.
Andrew Crane is a Professor of Business and Society and Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath (UK). He has a PhD from the University of Nottingham (UK) and has previously held faculty positions at Cardiff University and University of Nottingham, and York University (Canada). His recent work has focused on understanding the business of modern slavery and helping public, private and civil organizations develop evidence-based solutions to the problem. His books include an award-winning textbook on Business Ethics, the Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility, and Social Partnerships and Responsible Business. He has published in some of the world’s leading scholarly management journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, and the California Management Review. Dr. Crane is the co-editor of the journal, Business & Society, the leading journal in the field of business and society. He is a frequent contributor to the media, including the Financial Times, New York Times, Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal, and Guardian.
Grace Peña Delgado is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include North American border-making processes, Chinese in the Americas, the policing of sexuality and morals, and transnationalism. Professor Delgado received her Ph.D. from UCLA in American History. She is the author of Making the Chinese American: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the US-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: 2012) and a forthcoming work on prostitution, deportation, and policing in North America’s borderlands, Sex and State: Prostitution, White Slavery, and the Policing of Bodies at North America’s Modern Borderlands. Delgado is also co-author of Latino Immigrants in the United States (Polity: 2012). She has published numerous articles in the Journal of Social History, Journal of American History, and Western Historical Quarterly, where her piece, “Border Control and Sexual Policing” received numerous best article awards. Dr. Delgado participates on the AHRC Project on Trafficking, Smuggling and Illicit Migration in Historical and Gendered Perspective. In addition to her research, Professor Delgado is lead faculty for UCSC’s Dissertation Proposal Development Program with the SSRC-Mellon Foundation.
Anna Mae Duane is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her scholarship focuses on children and race in a variety of constellations, including children as both victim and political actors in Puritan trial proceedings; antebellum literature; pre-and post-emancipation slave narratives; contemporary children’s literature; modern anti-slavery materials; and adult popular culture. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (2010) and the editor of The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies in the Humanities (2013). Dr. Duane is also the editor of two forthcoming collections: Who Writes for Black Children? (2017) and Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (2017), which seeks to problematize how ideas about childhood and slavery have been—and continue to be–mutually constitutive. She also serves as co-editor of Common-place, An Interactive Journal of Early American Life. Professor Duane has been the recipient of two NEH grants and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2011, teaching African American literature at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
Gunther Peck is Associate Professor of History at Duke University. His research focuses on the long history of human trafficking and its relationship to the evolution of racial ideology, humanitarian intervention, and immigration policy in North America and Europe. He is the author of Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1885 – 1930 (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently working on two manuscripts: The Shadow of White Slavery: Innocence, Rescue, and Empire in Contemporary Human Trafficking Campaigns and Trafficking in Race: White Slavery and the Rise of a Transatlantic Working Class, 1660 – 1860. In addition to mentoring both History and Public Policy graduate students, he regularly teaches four undergraduate lecture courses entitled “Immigrant Dreams, American Realities: U.S. Immigration Policy History,” “Historicizing Whiteness,” “Human Trafficking, Past to Present,” and “North American Environmental History.” As a community activist in North Carolina, Professor Peck has also taken a keen interest in voting rights and understanding how and why citizens do and do not vote.
Joel Quirk is the Head of the Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research focuses on slavery and abolition, human mobility and human rights, social movements and the politics of arguments, and the history and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Quirk is the author of Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery (UNESCO, 2009) and The Anti-Slavery Project (University of Pennsylvania, 2011). He is the editor of five books, including Mobility Makes States (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), and Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (UBC Press, 2017). His articles have appeared in a wide variety of edited volumes and in journals such as the Review of International Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, International Relations, and the Journal of Human Rights. He is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, where he serves as Rapporteur, and is also an editor for openDemocracy’s ‘Beyond Trafficking and Slavery.’
Jenifer (JJ) Rosenbaum is a Robina Foundation Visiting Human Rights Fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights, Yale Law School where she focuses on a human rights approach to raising standards for low-wage workers on global supply chains—both global production networks and global labor subcontracting chains. Her research and consultations with worker organizations focus on legal, policy, and organizing approaches to raising workplace standards, overcoming forced labor, and promoting new forms of bargaining. She was previously the founding Legal and Policy Director for the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice where she was the legal strategist behind national campaigns including the Justice @ Hershey’s and the CJ’s seafood campaign. She has litigated cases before trial and appellate courts, led national policy campaigns, and testified before the United States Congress on labor issues of migrant workers. In 2014, she was appointed by United States Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Whistleblower Protection Advisory Committee.
Elena Shih is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and Directs the Human Trafficking research cluster through the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Her current book manuscript, “Manufacturing Freedom: Moral and Political Economies of Human Trafficking Rescue,” is a global ethnography of sex trafficking rehabilitation programs in China, Thailand, and the US. Her research prioritizes people of color, immigrant, and sex worker experiences of anti-trafficking panics and policing. She is a former Fulbright Fellow to the Beijing Center for Women’s Law Studies and Legal Aid, and former Researcher at the United Nations Inter Agency Project Against Trafficking China office. Her articles have been published in Sociological Perspectives, Social Politics, Contexts, and positions: Asia Critique, and her research has received funding from the Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation, and ASA Community Action Research Initiative. She serves on the editorial board for the Anti-Trafficking Review, a peer-reviewed journal based out of the Global Alliance Against the Traffic in Women, and the Beyond Trafficking and Slavery editorial initiative through openDemocracy.
Zoe Trodd is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Director of the Rights Lab - a multi-million pound university Beacon of Excellence focused on ending slavery. Her focus is historic and contemporary antislavery. She is a member of the board of Historians Against Slavery and co-edits a book series for Cambridge University Press called Slaveries Since Emancipation. With Kevin Bales she runs a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) called Ending Slavery. She has published books about historic and contemporary slavery, the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and American protest literature. With Kevin Bales, Jean Allain and John Oldfield she holds an AHRC grant (£1.84 million) called The Antislavery Usable Past (2014-19). This project is unearthing, theorising and applying a usable past of antislavery examples and methods as a tool for policy makers and civil society in the movement to end contemporary global slavery.