Human Rights Speaker Series Biographies
- Itty Abraham is director of the South Asia Institute, the Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Chair, and associate professor of government and Asian studies. Prior to this appointment, he was a fellow at the East-West Center, Washington, and taught at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Abraham was program director for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Global Security and Cooperation at the Social Science Research Council in New York from 1992-2005, where he helped shape the intellectual framework for post-area studies scholarship. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Loyola College, Madras, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has received grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Wenner-Gren foundations, the Open Society Institute Burma Project and the U.S. Institute of Peace, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. His research interests include international relations, science and technology studies, and postcolonial theory. He is currently working on the history of Indian foreign policy and understanding social risk in regions of high natural background radiation.
- Álvaro Restrepo is one of Colombia´s Contemporary Dance pioneers. He studied Philosophy, Literature, Music and Theater, before dedicating his life to dance. His work has been seen in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. In 1992 he was commissioned as the Sub-Director of the Colombian Culture Institute and in 1993, as the Director of the Arts Superior Academy of Bogotá, where he created the first superior level Contemporary Dance school in the country. Since 1994, he has been living and working in Cartagena de Indias, where he created, with the French dancer and choreographer Marie France Delieuvin, EL COLEGIO DEL CUERPO de Cartagena de Indias - Colombia´s first Contemporary Dance choreographic formation center.
- Jenifer K. Harbury is an activist, author, and attorney who has spent much of the past twenty years working to monitor and promote human rights in Guatemala. Her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was a Mayan resistance leader who was "disappeared" by the Guatemalan military in 1992; subjected to long-term, severe torture; then extrajudicially executed. Harbury's efforts to save his life, which included three dangerous hunger strikes, resulted in startling disclosures about the close working relationship between the CIA and the Central American death squads. Since learning of her husband's death, she has devoted much of her time to pressing for human rights reforms for both the United States and Guatemalan governments. Harbury graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978 and has published two books about her experiences in Guatemala: Bridge of Courage (Common Courage Press, 1994) and Searching for Everardo (Warner Books, 1997). In 2005, Harbury published another book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way, which documents the long time use of torture by the CIA.
- Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin . She taught at the American University in Cairo from 1977 to 1983, and again 2006-07 as Visiting Professor and Acting Chair of English and Comparative Literature. Other teaching experience includes University College Galway (1992), University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (1998) and University of Natal in Durban (2002). She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire : Vol 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Vol 11, The Scramble for Africa (2003), and co-editor with Ferial Ghazoul of The View from Within: Writers and Critics and Contemporary Arabic Literature (1994), and with Toyin Falola of two volumes of essays in honor of Bernth Lindfors, Palavers of African Literature and African Writers and Readers (2002). She is currently working on an intellectual biography of the South African writer and activist, Ruth First.
Teaching and research interests include imperialism and orientalism, literature and human rights/social justice, the 19 th century novel, and comparative/interdisciplinary studies.
- Alejandro Moreno, MD, MPH, JD, FACP, FCLM, is a faculty member at the University of Texas Medical Branch Austin Programs where he serves as an Associate Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program. Dr. Moreno is also an adjunct faculty at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is the Associate Medical and Legal Director of the Center for Survivors of Torture and the co-founder of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at Boston Medical Center.
Dr. Moreno graduated from the Instituto de Ciencias de la Salud in Medellín, Colombia, where he received his medical degree. He completed his post-graduate clinical training at the Boston University Medical Center (Internal Medicine Residency Program and General Internal Medicine Fellowship Program). Dr. Moreno also holds a degree in public health from the Boston University School of Public Health and a law degree from St. Mary’s University. He actively practices medicine and law.
Dr. Moreno is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Legal Medicine. Since 1998, Dr. Moreno is a member of University of Texas Medical Branch Austin Programs.
Dr. Moreno has an extensive experience working with refugees, survivors of torture, and other immigrants. His work with these vulnerable populations includes direct patient care, curriculum development for medical and legal professionals, and clinical research. Dr. Moreno has served as an expert witness in numerous occasions before immigration court.
