Past Chair Biographies
2011-2012
2nd semesterDr. David Cohen
Professor of Social Work
Florida International University, Miami, Florida
Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work
Welcomed by Pascal-Henri Keller, Professeur de psychologie
University of Poitiers, Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Arts,
 |
David Cohen, Ph.D., holds degrees from McGill University (B.A. in Psychology), Carleton University (M.A. in Social Work), and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D. in Social Work and Psychiatric epidemiology). He is a Professor at the School of Social Work at Florida International University, in Miami, Florida, a psychotherapist and a consultant. Dr. Cohen is recognized as an expert on the adverse effects of psychotropic drugs and on psychiatric drug withdrawal.
He is author or co-author on 120 publications journals and books in social work, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, medicine, law, ethics, and nursing. In 2003, he has received the Elliot Freidson Award for outstanding publication in medical sociology, and the Times Educational Supplement Award for Best Academic Book. Dr. Cohen is regularly invited to speak at conferences and frequently called upon as an expert.
His research experience spans psychiatric epidemiological surveys to in-depth qualitative inquiries, with nearly 30 externally funded projects as principal or co-investigator. His recent grant from the Attorneys General Consumer and Prescriber Grant Program resulted in the creation and evaluation of CriticalThinkRx curriculum, a critical course on psychotropic medications aimed at non-medical practitioners and advocates in child welfare and mental health. CriticalThinkRx has been taken by over 4,000 social workers, psychologists and attorneys for continuing education credits. (www.criticalthinkrx.org). He is presently P.I. of an NIMH grant examining cultural factors in parental attitudes toward the prescription of psychotropic drugs to youths.
2010-2011
1st semester
Dr. Jack SANTINO
Professor of Popular Culture
Bowling Green State University
Welcomed by Pierre Lagayette, University Paris 4 - Paris Sorbonne
 |
Dr. Jack Santino holds a professorship in Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University and is Director of the Bowling Green Center for Culture Studies. His work focuses on the practices of American holidays, celebrations, and festivals; as emergent rituals and memorialization; as well as occupational culture and popular music.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 1, 1947. He received a bachelor's degree in English at Boston College, and eventually got his Ph.D. degrees in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. His thesis was entitled "The outlaw emotions: workers' narratives from three contemporary occupations".
Dr. Santino has worked at the Smithsonian Institution's folklife program, organizing presentations at the annual Festival of American Folklife. From 1996-2000, Dr. Santino was the editor of the Journal of American Folklore. In 2000, he was a guest professor at the Institute for North American Studies at the University of Alcala, Spain. From 2002-2003, Dr. Santino was the President of the American Folklore Society. Dr. Santino has worked on ethnographic films, notably the multiple Emmy Award-winning Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: The Story of the Black Pullman Porter. He has published scholarly articles in major folklore journals, and is the author or editor of many books, including All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life; The Hallowed Eve: Dimensions of a Calendar Festival in Northern Ireland; Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Uses of Symbols in Public; New Old-Fashioned Ways: Holidays and Popular Culture; and most recently Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.
Dr. Leila SADAT
Professor of Law
Washington University in Saint Louis Law School
Welcomed by Professor Pierre-Henri Prélot of the University of Cergy-Pontoise, Faculté de Droit
 |
Leila Sadat is the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and the Director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at the Washington University School of Law, where she has taught since 1992. A leading authority in international law, international criminal law and human rights, Sadat is particularly well-known for her expertise on the International Criminal Court. Sadat received her J.D. from Tulane Law School, summa cum laude, and holds graduate law degrees from Columbia University School of Law (LLM, summa cum laude) and the University of Paris I - Sorbonne (diplôme d'études approfondies). Sadat practiced international business law for several years in Paris, France, prior to entering law teaching, and is admitted to the bar in Paris and in Louisiana. She clerked for Judge Albert Tate, Jr., on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as both of France's Supreme Courts, the Cour de Cassation and the Conseil d'Etat. A prolific scholar, Sadat is the author of several books and more than 60 articles on topics in international law, comparative law and human rights.
Sadat is the Director of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a multi-year project to draft and, ultimately, have taken up by States for negotiation and adoption, a proposed convention on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. Her book on the subject, Forging a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity, will be published by Cambridge University this year. In 1995, Sadat was named to chair the International Law Association committee on the ICC, and served as an NGO delegate to the U.N. Preparatory Committee and to the 1998 U.N. diplomatic conference in Rome at which the Court was established, as well as at the Kampala Review Conference in 2010. Her monograph, The International Criminal Court and the Transformation of International Law: Justice for the New Millennium, which was supported by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace won the "Book of the Year" award from the International Association of Penal Law (American National Section), and is considered a “classic” text on the International Criminal Court.
Sadat has also published several law review articles on U.S. foreign policy and international criminal law including Terrorism and the Rule of Law, Ghost Prisoners and Black Sites and Do all Arabs Really Look Alike? Her most recent article, The Nuremberg Paradox compares the U.S. and French approaches to international criminal law and was published in the American Journal of Comparative Law and won the article of the year award from the International Association of Penal Law (American National Section).
From May 2001 until September 2003, Professor Sadat served as a Congressional appointee to the nine-member U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom. More recently, she was tapped to participate in a Council on Foreign Relations Special Report on international justice, as well as an ASIL study on US engagement with the ICC “beyond Kampala.” Professor Sadat is often heard on national media, and has an active speaking schedule. She is active in professional associations including the American Society of Comparative Law, the International Law Association and the American Society of International Law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute and the International Academy of Comparative Law, Vice-President of the International Association of Penal Law (American National Section) and has been the Chairwoman and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Law Students Association.
2009-2010
1st semester
Dr. Louis Edward WOLCHER
Professor of law (Chaire Charles I. Stone)
University of Washington in Seattle
Welcomed by the Professor Roxana Family
at the Université de Cergy Pontoise
Faculté de droit
Professor Wolcher joined the faculty of the School of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1986, after nine years of law practice with the firm of Pettit & Martin, in San Francisco, and three years on the faculty of the Rutgers-Camden Law School, in New Jersey. His primary research interests lie in the fields of philosophy of law, legal and political theory, and human rights. Holding an undergraduate degree in history from Stanford University, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1973, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1973-1974 he served as a law clerk to Bernard Levinson, a justice on the Hawaii Supreme Court. He has taught many different subjects, including contracts, torts, civil procedure, federal courts, antitrust, restitution, admiralty, human rights in philosophy and practice, critical perspectives on law, and philosophy of law. He also occasionally teaches a class on theories of justice to undergraduates in the University of Washington's Honors Program. A member of the editorial board of Law & Critique (Kluwer Academic Publishers), an international journal of legal theory, he also serves on the advisory board of the Slovenian Law Review (University of Ljubljana).
His honors include a recently awarded Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies for the fall semester of 2009 at University of Cergy-Pontoise School of Law, located near Paris, France, a Fulbright Award to study and teach in Slovenia, an invitation to lecture to the judges of the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France, and a philosophical prize in the 2000 International Essay Competition, co-sponsored by the city of Weimar and the European cultural magazine Lettre International.
Recognized by the students as Teacher of the Year in 1992 and 1999, he was given the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005. Professor Wolcher has visited and lectured at a number of institutions around the world, including the Institute of Political Science and Management (Uzbekistan), the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco), Birkbeck College (London), the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Kobe University (Japan), Osaka University (Japan), Mofid University (Iran), the University of Bergen (Norway), and the Irish Centre for Human Rights (Ireland).
The author of more than fifty articles, essays and book chapters, his most recent book, Law's Task: The Tragic Circle of Law, Justice and Human Suffering, was published in 2008 by Ashgate, and his book Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy was published in 2005 by Routledge-Cavendish (Birkbeck Law Press).
See Louis Wolcher’s Grantee Story
2nd semester
Dr. Victor George RODWIN
Professor of Health Policy and Management,
Wagner School of Public service, New York University
Welcomed by Professor Alfred Spira
at the Ecole de Santé de Paris Sud and the Unité Inserm U. 822, santé reproductive, sexualité, infection à VIH, Epidémiologie, Démographie et Sciences sociales
Université Paris –Sud 11, Faculté de médecine
Victor G. Rodwin, Professor of Health Policy and Management, New York University Wagner, teaches courses on community health and medical care, comparative analysis of health care systems and international perspectives on health system performance and reform. Professor Rodwin was awarded the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair during the Spring semester of 2010 while he was based at the University of Paris–Orsay 11. In 2000, he was the recipient of a three-year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Investigator Award on "Megacities and Health: New York, London, Paris and Tokyo." His research on this theme led to the establishment of the World Cities Project (WCP) -- a collaborative venture among Wagner/NYU, and the International Longevity Center-USA, which focuses on neighborhood aging, po pulation health and the health care systems in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and among neighborhoods within these world cities.
Professor Rodwin is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Health Planning Predicament: France, Quebec, England, and the United States (University of California Press, 1984); The End of an Illusion: The Future of Health Policy in Western Industrialized Nations (with J. de Kervasdoué and J. Kimberly, University of California Press, 1984); Public Hospitals in New York and Paris (with C. Brecher, D. Jolly, and R. Baxter), New York University Press, 1992); Japan's Universal and Affordable Health Care: Lessons for the U.S.? (Japan Society, 1994); Growing Older in Four World Cities: New York, London, Paris and Tokyo (edited with M. Gusmano), Vanderbilt University Press 2006; Universal Health Insurance in France: How Sustainable? Essays on the French Health Care System (Washington DC, Embassy of France, 2006); and Health Care in World Cities: New York, London and Paris (with M. Gusmano and D. Weisz), Johns Hopkins University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Recent journal articles have appeared in Health Affairs, New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Urban Health, Health Economics Policy and Law, and Health Policy, Politics and Law.
Before launching WCP, Professor Rodwin directed the Wagner School’s International Initiative (1992 to 1998), and its Advanced Management Program for Clinicians (1987-1992). From 1983 to 1985 he was Assistant Professor of Health Policy at the University of California–San Francisco. Professor Rodwin has been a member of the Academy for Social Insurance since 1998. He reviews articles for leading journals in the field on a regular basis and has consulted with the French National Health Insurance Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization. Professor Rodwin earned his Ph.D. in city and regional planning, and his MPH in public health, at the University of California, Berkeley.
See Victor Rodwin’s Grantee Story
Return to Distinguished Chair Award
2008-2009
1st Semester
Raphael J. SONENSHEIN
California State University, Fullerton
Political Science
Welcomed by Mme Frédérick Douzet
at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes- Saint Denis
Institut Français de Géopolitique
Raphael J. Sonenshein, professor of political science and public administration at California State University, Fullerton, received his B.A. in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has written extensively on the relationships among racial and ethnic groups, and on the governance of American cities. His book Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 1993) received the 1994 Ralph J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association as the best political science book of the year on the subject of racial and ethnic pluralism. Dr. Sonenshein served as Executive Director of the City of Los Angeles (Appointed) Charter Reform Commission between 1997 and 1999. In 2006, Dr. Sonenshein was named Executive Director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Review Commission to examine the system set up in the 1999 charter.
2nd Semester
Lorenzo MORRIS
Howard University
Political Science
Welcomed by Mme Frédérick Douzet
at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes- Saint Denis
Institut Français de Géopolitique
Lorenzo Morris is a professor of political science, author and consultant on international and American public policy and electoral behavior. He is currently chairing the Political Science Department of Howard University. He has taught previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the Institute for the Study of Educational Policy. He has also served internationally as visiting lecturer in several francophone universities. He is a frequent television and radio public affairs commentator in Belgium, Canada, France, Switzerland, West Africa, and the U.S.
He has published five scholarly books on race and presidential politics, higher education policy and on party politics. He has published approximately seventy articles on a variety of political concerns including black politics, Quebec politics, French party politics, race specificity in American public policy and U.S. foreign policy in Haiti. His most recent work includes “Presidential Impeachment” in The National Political Science Review and continuing research on African Americans in the Democratic Party. He has served as a consultant on several development assistance projects involving educational administration in Haiti, Botswana and Indonesia and electoral participation in Benin and
Senegal. He was an advisor and/or election observer for several foreign elections including the U.S delegation in Haiti in 1990.
He has held leadership positions in several major scholarly and research organizations. He is co-director of the Census Information Center at Howard University. He has been president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientist. He was vice-chair of the University Senate and president of Phi Beta Kappa at Howard. He was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He graduated from Fisk University
with honors and studied at Oberlin College and Yale University. He received his Ph.D.and M.A. degrees in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Return to Distinguished Chair Award
2007-2008
1st Semester
Philip E. PROTTER
Cornell University
Applied Mathématics in Finance
Welcomed by Professor Elyès Jouini
at the Université Paris Dauphine
See Philip Protter's Grantee Story
Protter joined the Cornell faculty in 2000 after twenty-two years in the Mathematics and Statistics Departments of Purdue University. Before that he had spent one year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and two years in the Mathematics Department of Duke University. While at Purdue he has held one year visiting appointments at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and the Universities of Rennes, Rouen, and Paris 6 in France. He has also been an invited short term visitor at the Universities of Paris 1, 6, and 10; and the Universities of Strasbourg, Provence, Nice, Marne-la-Vallée, and Nancy in France; ETH in Zurich; the University of Rome 1; the University of Bonn and Humboldt University (Berlin) in Germany; and Warwick University in England. He has also given short courses (ranging from a week to a month) in Pari
s, Zurich, Perugia (Italy), Lahtia (Finland), and Santiago de Chile. He has also been a frequent visitor at INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France.
Protter is currently Editor-in-Chief of Stochastic Processes and Their Applications, and Associate Editor of Finance and Stochastics, Mathematical Finance, Revista de Matemáticas Aplicadas, and Infinite Dimensional Analysis and Quantum Probability. He is formerly Associate Editor of the Annals of Probability, and the Annals of Applied Probability. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
2nd Semester
William L. MEGGINSON
Oklahoma University
Finance
Welcomed by Professor Edith Ginglinger
at the Université Paris-Dauphine
See Bill Megginson's Grantee story
PhD (Florida State) Professor Megginson's research interests include international finance and corporate finance issues such as capital structure, venture capital and entrepreneurial finance, dividend policy and corporate control. Much of his recent research has focused on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and he has recently served as a paid consultant for the Italian government, the New York Stock Exchange, the OECD, the International Federation of Stock Exchanges and Harvard and Princeton universities on the subject of listing privatized-firm shares on American stock markets. His teaching interests include corporate, international and entrepreneurial finance, and he won two teaching awards at the University of Georgia.
Professor Megginson has published articles in several academic journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking and Financial Management. His 1994 paper documenting performance improvements for newly privatized firms won a Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Award for outstanding research published in the Journal of Finance. In addition, the paper has been reprinted by several publishing firms and organizations, including the World Bank. Professor Megginson is an associate editor for the Journal of Financial Research and has authored or co-authored four textbooks. Prior to entering academia, he worked for five years as a petroleum chemist in the oil refining and petrochemical industries.
Return to Distinguished Chair Award
2006-2007
1st Semester
George Alan BERMANN,
Columbia University
Comparative International Law
Welcomed by
Professor Horatia Muir- Watt
at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
See George A. Bermann's Grantee story
George Bermann is the Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law (a chair conferred by the Commission of the European Communities), as well as the Walter Gellhorn Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he obtained his LLM from Columbia Law School in 1975.
He has been a member of the Columbia Law School faculty since 1975, teaching a range of subjects: initially heavily domestic (contracts and administrative law), but now for many years entirely comparative, international and transnational. His principal courses are at present European Union Law, Comparative Law, Transnational Litigation and Arbitration, and WTO Dispute Resolution.
During the 2005-06 academic year, Professor Bermann initiated - with Professor Katharina Pistor - a pioneering spring elective for first-year students on "Lawyering in Multiple Legal Orders: An Introduction to Comparative and International Law." This course serves as vital "bridge" between the first-year curriculum and the worlds of foreign comparative and international law, with which the law that Columbia students will study and eventually practice is inextricably linked. Besides learning the basics of international law (both public and private) and of the civil law, a family of legal systems with which they are destined to have professional if not personal contact, students in this course also study some of the key dynamics of legal globalization and its processes: harmonization and unification of law, "transplants" and other comparative law influences, regional (e.g. NAFTA) and more universal (e.g. WTO) integration, and law in transition societies. It is a dynamic and utterly current undertaking.
Professor Bermann is also a member of the teaching faculty of the College d'Europe in Bruges, Belgium, and also regularly gives courses at the Universities of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), as well as the Institut des Sciences Politiques ("Sciences Po") in Paris for its DESS en Droit de la Globalisation. He holds a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). He taught as Eason-Weinmann Visiting Professor of Comparative Law at Tulane Law School in New Orleans, taught European Union Law at New York University School of Law, and been visiting scholar at the Legal Service of the European Commission in Brussels, the French Conseil d'Etat, the Max Planck Institute for Foreign Public Law and International Law, and Princeton University's Center for International Studies.
Professor Bermann undertook a Tocqueville-Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at the University of Paris from June to December, 2006. He is one of the main actors in the creation of a double law degree between Columbia University and Paris I.
Charles Patrick HENRY
University of California, Berkeley
Political Science / African American Studies
Welcomed by Professor Claudine Raynaud
at the Université François Rabelais à Tours
Charles P. Henry, is the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Chair of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1994, President Clinton appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities for a six-year term. Former president of the National Council for Black Studies, Henry is the author/editor of seven books and more than 80 articles and reviews on Black politics, public policy, and human rights. Before joining the University of California at Berkeley in 1981, Henry taught at Denison University and Howard University. Henry was chair of the board of directors of Amnesty International U.S.A. from 1986 to 1988 and is a former NEH Post-doctoral Fellow and American Political Science Association congressional Fellow. Professor Henry was Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History and Politics at the University of Bologna, Italy for the Spring semester of 2003. In the fall of 2006, Henry was one of the first two Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chairs in France teaching at the University of Tours. Chancellor Birgeneau presented Henry with the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in April 2008. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
2nd Semester
Wade Clark ROOF
University of California, Santa Barbara
Sociology : Religion and society in the United States
Welcomed by Professor François Weil
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
Wade C. Roof holds a PhD in the sociology and psychology of religion from the University of North Carolina. He is the J.F. Rowny Professor of Religion and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also serves as the chair of the University's Department of Religious Studies. His main areas of research interest are sociology of religion and American religious trends, and he has published widely in both fields, most recently serving as editor in chief for Macmillan Reference’s Contemporary American Religion (2000). He also teaches a range of both undergraduate and graduate courses on religion and society.
Return to Distinguished Chair Award
