Keynote Speakers

David Mwambari

Centre for Research on Peace and Development (CRPD)

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

David Mwambari is a life learner whose calling and profession is to research, teach and write on official and especially vernacular narratives of the past and how they shape societies and politics in different contexts in Africa and beyond. He is the principal investigator for the European Research Council (ERC)-funded “Traveling Memories, Silences and Secrets: Life narratives of Violence Among Refugees from Africa’s Great Lakes Region (AGLR)” Project. David’s ethnographic research fuses arts-based and qualitative research methods that includes folklore, orature and the co-production of artistic performances. He is the author of Navigating Cultural Memory (Oxford University Press, 2023), peer reviewed journal articles, poetry and essays. He was previously an assistant professor at King’s College London (UK), and the United States University-Africa (Kenya). David has also held postdoctoral position at Ghent University (Belgium), and visiting fellowships at McKenzie University (Brazil), The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Senegal), Cambridge University and Oxford University (UK). He studied in Kenya, South Africa, USA and Australia.

Francesca Polletta is Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies the cultural dimensions of protest and politics, asking how and when politically disadvantaged groups have mobilized meanings to make change. Her books include Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Univ. Chicago, 2002), It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Univ. Chicago, 2006), Inventing the Ties that Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life (Univ. Chicago, 2020), and, with Edwin Amenta, Changing Minds: Movements and Cultural Impact (Russell Sage Foundation Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book titled The Trouble with Stories, which asks when stories persuade—and why they often do not persuade. 

Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the social and cultural implications of political violence and its afterlives, and his writings have been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. His books include The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003; co-edited with Neil Levi), and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000). With Yasemin Yildiz, he is completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance. He has also written for public-facing venues such as Inside Higher Ed, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation, as well as German-language publications such as Die Zeit, Berliner Zeitung, and Geschichte der Gegenwart. The 2021 German translation of Multidirectional Memory prompted a national debate in the mainstream press about the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism. 

Photo Credit: David Wu, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies          

Amy Shuman is Professor Emeritus of Folklore at The Ohio State University and past president of The Fellows of the American Folklore Society. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and The American Folklore Society Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a narrative scholar whose ethnographic and oral history research has focused on disability, political asylum, and Italian stonecarvers. Her books include Storytelling Rights: the uses of oral and written texts among urban adolescents; Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy; Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century (with Carol Bohmer); and Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion (with Carol Bohmer).