Alexandra S Moore is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Human Rights Institute at Binghamton University. Her publications include two monographs, most recently Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture (2015), and seven edited collections, including Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights to Literature and Culture (with Samantha Pinto, 2020), Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Survivors and Human Rights Workers (with Elizabeth Swanson, 2018); and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (with Sophia A McClennen, 2015). She publishes widely on representations of human rights violations in contemporary literature and film. Her current research is on cultural renditions of Guantánamo in the global war on terror.
Elizabeth Swanson is Professor of English and Mandell Family Foundation Senior Term Chair in Literature and Human Rights at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. Author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights (2007), Dr Swanson has co-edited, with Alexandra S Moore, Witnessing Torture: Perspectives from Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers (2018); Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (2015); and Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2011). Author of numerous articles and book chapters on human rights and literature, she also recently co-edited Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries (2018) with James Brewer Stewart. Swanson’s NGO work operates on a parallel track with her scholarship: currently a Co-Chair of Historians Against Slavery, she also led the Board of Made By Survivors (now Her Future Coalition) from 2008-2016, working directly with survivors of slavery in India and Nepal; with torture survivors and asylees in the United States; and with incarcerated people in Massachusetts prisons. A Commissioner for the Barnstable County (Cape Cod) Human Rights Commission from 2010-2015, Dr Swanson is committed to working directly with and centering the voices of survivors regarding our most pressing global human rights concerns.
