Community

Professor Brian Schiff

Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention 

Professor Schiff works with AUP faculty, students and the broader research community to provide cross-disciplinary scholarship on the contribution of the archives to the possibility of enduring peace and understanding. Read Brian's full bio here. 

Constance Pâris de Bollardière 

Assistant Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention 

As a historian, Constance contributes to the scientific agenda of the Center. She defended her Ph.D. in History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2017. Her research, entitled “The Everlastingness of our People": An American Jewish Socialist Aid in the Yiddish Diaspora, the Jewish Labor Committee in Postwar France (1944-1948)", focuses on the transnational relation between Yiddish speaking Socialists -mainly Bundists and left wing Zionists- in America and France in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and deals with social work, displacement and migration of Holocaust survivors, Yiddish culture, identity reconstruction, Holocaust memory, French politics and labor movements during the early Cold War.

Her current research concerns are Holocaust memory in Yiddish and the use of testimonies in historical research on mass violence.

Constance Pâris de Bollardière supervises the viewing and the showcasing of the Visual History Archive at AUP and advises researchers, teachers, students and anyone interested in these video testimonies. Read Constance's full bio here.

Kelly Demjanick

Administrator and Communications Coordinator of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention. Kelly also supervises the viewing of the Archives at AUP and assists in research projects. She holds a JD, an LLM in International Comparative Law (Trinity College Dublin), and she completed her MA in International Affairs at AUP in 2019 and has worked in several legal environments.

Scientific Committee

Jessica Feldman

Professor Feldman joined the Global Communications faculty at AUP in 2018. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, after earning a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2017. Her dissertation considered how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames social and political possibilities. This research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation to support interdisciplinary research on privacy and democracy across the social sciences and engineering. She is also an artist whose work has been exhibited and performed internationally. She received an MFA from Bard in 2007 and taught media and sound art at Temple University and The New School from 2009-2012. She often collaborates with designers, and combines theory and practice in her teaching and her research. Read Jessica’s full bio here.

Caroline Laurent

Caroline D. Laurent is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies whose interdisciplinary research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literatures and cultures, with special emphasis on Metropolitan France, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. Professor Laurent notably specializes in comparative genocide studies in relation to literature and art. Her book manuscript, The Words of Others: Remembering and Writing Genocide as an Indirect Witness, examines literary and graphic representations of genocidal violence (the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmers rouges’ violence and genocide in Cambodia). She is particularly interested in the perspectives of indirect witnesses and in issues related to transgenerational transmission of trauma. She has published several articles on these questions in Nouvelles études francophones, French Cultural Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Read Caroline’s full bio here.

Zed Zhipeng Gao

Zed Zhipeng Gao is a political psychologist who approaches China and Chinese diaspora from interdisciplinary perspectives. His dissertation was on the history of psychology in Chinese communist movement. In this project, he examines how psychologists, when caught in the Cold War confrontation, national plan for economic development, malfunctioning bureaucracy, and ideological indoctrination, contributed to an inflated mass belief in human agency which in turned fueled the tragic unravel of the cultural revolution. More recently, Gao has been studying Chinese diaspora amid international conflict. In a journal special issue Theorizing the Psychology of Deglobalization that he co-edited, Gao discusses Chinese immigrants’ experience of “double unbelonging” that stems from both racism in the host country and nationalist exclusion from China. In another ongoing work, Gao analyzes how a persecuted and exiled religious organization, while continuing its protest against the Chinese authoritarian state, transmorphed into a major force in the right wing of North American politics.