THE RULE OF LAW ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

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Project Leadership

David P. Briand, Project Coordinator

Interviewers

Gerry Albarelli

Gerry Albarelli is the author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva (Glad Day Books, 2001), chronicling his experience as a non-Jew teaching English as a second language to Yiddish-speaking Hasidic boys at a yeshiva in Brooklyn. He has published stories in numerous anthologies and reviews, including The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, Global City Review, The Breast, and Fairleigh Dickinson Review. Albarelli is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts program, and is an interviewer for the Columbia Center for Oral History. He has worked on numerous oral history projects, most recently the Rule of Law Oral History Project, documenting the state of human and civil rights in the post-­9/11 world, particularly the implications of the detention of "war on terror" suspects at Guantánamo Bay.

Myron A. Farber

Myron A. Farber, a writer and oral historian based in New York, is a former investigative reporter for the New York Times. During his tenure at the Times from 1966 to 1993, he reported on subjects ranging from higher education and philanthropy to major crimes, corruption and racial conflict, both in New York and nationally. He has also contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure and co-produced programs for Dateline NBC. Nominated five times for the Pulitzer Prize, he has won numerous awards from, among others, the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, the American Newspaper Guild, the Scripps-Howard Foundation and the Society for Professional Journalists. In 1978 Mr. Farber was jailed for forty days for refusing to disclose confidential sources for articles relating to a New Jersey doctor suspected of murdering the patients of colleagues. His jailing led to the strengthening of shield law protection for journalists in New Jersey and elsewhere. The governor of New Jersey granted Mr. Farber a full pardon of his criminal contempt conviction.

Born in Baltimore, Mr. Farber was educated at the University of Maryland and Northwestern University, for graduate history study, and worked briefly at the Hartford Courant before going to the Times. He is the author of Somebody is Lying: The Story of Dr. X (Doubleday, 1982), a finalist for the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America, and co-author of Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax (Bantam, 1990), which is being adapted for television. Mr. Farber resigned from the Times in 1993 to conduct a three-year private inquiry into the unsolved murder of the daughter of former United States Senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois. For several years in the late 1990s he was retained as an investigator and advisor in a complex probate case in Micronesia involving air courier DHL and its founder, Larry L. Hillblom. Mr. Farber has spoken on the press and the law at judicial and bar association forums, written for the American Bar Association, and holds an honorary doctor of laws degree from Skidmore College. For Columbia University’s Center for Oral History, he has conducted extensive interviews over the last decade related to the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Council on Foreign Relations, capital punishment in the United States and, currently, the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

George Gavrilis

George Gavrilis is Executive Director of the Hollings Center for International Dialogue in Washington, D.C. and senior research scholar at Columbia University in New York. His research is in the fields of border management, international assistance to post-conflict states, and politics and economy of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In 2008-2009, he served as an International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and worked with the United Nations on various policy initiatives on Central Asia and Afghanistan. He previously taught international relations and comparative politics in the Department of Government at the University of Texas-Austin, directed research for the CFR Oral History Project at Columbia University, and served as a National Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

He is author of The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and has published articles in Foreign Affairs and the New York Times on Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel and the West Bank.

Ronald J. Grele

Ronald J. Grele is the former Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. Prior to coming to Columbia, he directed the Oral History Program at UCLA and served as Research Director at the New Jersey Historical Commission and Assistant Director of the Ford Foundation Oral History Project. He began his career in oral history as an interviewer and archivist at the John F. Kennedy Oral History Project. He has been awarded a Fulbright teaching appointment at the University of Indonesia and has conducted workshops and seminars on oral history throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In 1988 he was elected President of the Oral History Association and was for a number of years editor of The International Journal of Oral History.

He is the author of Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History among other works, and editor of Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History. He received his doctorate from Rutgers University and has taught at Lafayette College, The California State University at Long Beach and Kingsborough Community College. He has served as a consultant on number of oral history projects and for a number of museums and historical agencies. He has undertaken projects on the history of the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles, McKinsey & Company, and the Boston Consulting Group. He is currently conducting interviews for the Columbia Oral History office with women graduates of the Columbia Law School and with directors and officers of The Atlantic Philanthropies and the General Atlantic Group, and for a community history project documenting the social and cultural history of Harlem.

Anne McClintock

Anne McClintock is the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW-Madison. She has been the recipient of many awards, including two MacArthur-SSRC Fellowships. She is the author of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Imperial Leather was chosen to be one of 300 books to be published online by the ACLS E-History project and is currently being translated into Portuguese.

McClintock has written short biographies of Olive Schreiner and Simone de Beauvoir and a monograph on madness, sexuality and colonialism called Double Crossings. She has co-edited Dangerous Liaisons with Ella Shohat and Aamir Mufti , as well as two special journal issues, one on sex work and one on race and queer theory. McClintock has written over 40 articles and reviews, and has given numerous keynote addresses and lectures in the U.S. and abroad on sexuality, race, gender, nationalism, imperialism, photography, visual culture, and contemporary culture in a wide range of prominent venues and journals, including Critical Inquiry, Transition, Social Text, New Formations, Feminist Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian (London), The Times Literary Supplement, The Village Voice, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others. Her articles and essays have been widely reprinted and anthologized both in the U.S. and internationally.

Her creative non-fiction book Skin Hunger. A Chronicle of Sex, Desire and Money is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape. Her anthology The Sex Work Reader is forthcoming from Vintage; and Screwing the System, a collection of essays on sexuality and power, is forthcoming from Routledge. She is working on a new book called Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, which has been solicited for consideration by Yale University Press.

McClintock has been awarded numerous Artist Residency Fellowships at Macdowell, Yaddo, Blue Mountain, VCCA and Dorland. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Taiwanese and Madarin.

Kanishk Tharoor

Kanishk Tharoor’s pieces on politics and culture have appeared in publications around the world, including the Guardian, The Independent, The National, The Hindu, The Times of India, The Telegraph (Calcutta), the Caravan, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Foreign Policy, openDemocracy, and YaleGlobal Online. His appearances on radio and TV include BBC’s Today programme, BBC News, BBC Radio Scotland and the Colbert Report. He is also a published and award-winning author of short fiction. He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies. He is currently a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow at New York University.