Columbia University to Host Conversation with IAGS President Henry Theriault

NEW YORK—Join a conversation with Dr. Henry Theriault, recently elected as President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), on human rights violations around the world, the state of genocide studies today, genocide prevention, reparations, denial, and more. The event, titled “’Impossible Harms’: A Conversation with Prof. Henry Theriault,” will take place on Thursday, November 30, at 7:00 p.m., at 301 Pupin Hall, 538 West 120th Street (at Broadway), Columbia University.

The program is co-sponsored by the Armenian Center at Columbia University, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, NAASR / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues, and the Research Institute on Turkey.

Dr. Theriault has served as founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Genocide Studies International, chaired the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group and was lead author of its 2015 final report, and his autobiographical narrative, “Out of the Shadow of War and Genocide,” was included in Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights from Scholars in the Field (2015), edited by Samuel Totten. After 19 years on the faculty in the Philosophy Department at Worcester State, in 2017 he became Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs.

As a scholar who has been a leading voice among of genocide studies over the past decade and more, and now as President of the IAGS, a position to which he was elected in June 2017, Theriault is among those setting the agenda for genocide studies. In his inaugural address, he stated that “genocide studies has been at the forefront of recent human rights advances. … Demagogues attack the sensibilities genocide studies engenders. Our work is a crucial challenge to their propaganda.”