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Meet Our Editorial Board

Elsa Stamatopoulou

Elsa Stamatopoulou joined Columbia University in 2011 after a 31-year service at the United Nations dedicated to human rights and Indigenous Peoples’ rights. She became the first Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2003.....

<< Read more >> Elsa Stamatopoulou joined Columbia University in 2011 after a 31-year service at the United Nations dedicated to human rights and Indigenous Peoples’ rights. She became the first Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2003. In 2011, she taught the first-ever course at Columbia on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, the first course on cultural rights and is the first Director of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia, also co-chairing Columbia’s University Seminar on Indigenous Studies. Her academic background is in international law, criminal justice and political science (Athens Law School, Vienna University, Northeastern University and Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva) and she has worked on international normative frameworks, institution-building, the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other groups, women’s rights, cultural rights, development, private sector and inter-governmental cooperation. She has cooperated closely with non-governmental organizations in her native Greece and elsewhere and has received the Ingrid Washinawatok El Issa O’Peqtaw Metaehmoh-Flying Eagle Woman Peace, Justice and Sovereignty Award; the award of the NGO Committee on the Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples; the Eleanor Roosevelt Award of the Human Rights Centre. In 2016, she was featured as one of the UN’s 80 Leading Women from 1945-2016. At Columbia, Prof. Stamatopoulou is affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Department of Anthropology.

Martha Saxton

Martha Saxton has spent her professional life researching and writing about American women’s lives and the social and economic forces on them, from the colonial period to the present. She taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for twenty years.....

<< Read more >> Martha Saxton has spent her professional life researching and writing about American women’s lives and the social and economic forces on them, from the colonial period to the present. She taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for twenty years and before that at Columbia University, in the History Department and in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She also taught for seven years in the Inside/Out Program at Amherst College, taking college students to meet with an equal number of incarcerated students weekly for a semester. The topics ranged from human rights with an emphasis on the rights of the incarcerated, to a history of criminal justice in the US, to a course on the role of sexual equality in eradicating gender based violence. Institutions including Amherst College, The Society for Fellows in the Humanities, The Bunting Institute (of Radcliffe College) and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library have supported her research and writing.

Marcus Thompson

Marcus Thompson MBE, BA, MPhil. studied South Asian history, and Social Anthrology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He retired in 2010 from a 40 year career in international development with Oxfam GB, working in various roles.....

<< Read more >> Marcus Thompson MBE, BA, MPhil. studied South Asian history, and Social Anthrology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He retired in 2010 from a 40 year career in international development with Oxfam GB, working in various roles including Emergencies Director, Regional Programme Manager in South Asia, Country Director in various Asian countries, and Management Coach to country directors. Marcus has a particular interest in the indigenous populations of Central and North East India and their culture. He now lives in a village outside Oxford in the UK. He is currently Chair of Trustees of Asylum Welcome in Oxford (www.asylum-welcome.org). He is married with three children, two grand-daughters,...and many friends around the world.

Gilbert Smith

Gilbert Smith was born in Tennessee in the southern United States and grew up in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He now lives in New York City and is working as an administrator at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Mr. Smith did his undergraduate studies.....

<< Read more >> Gilbert Smith was born in Tennessee in the southern United States and grew up in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He now lives in New York City and is working as an administrator at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Mr. Smith did his undergraduate studies in industrial engineering at the University of Tennessee and holds a Master’s degree in business administration from Baruch College, City University of New York. A commitment to community service has led him to work in public health. He has written dozens of poems and songs beginning in childhood and continuing through the present. The works of Robert Hayden, Nikki Giovanni, and James Weldon Johnson has inspired him. Musical influences have been diverse. While rap has been his primary genre, Gilbert has promoted music as a universal language. He is a founding member of the Universal Language Room, a multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith effort to promote unity and inspire dialog by communicating with instruments rather than words. Mr. Smith writes on themes of his black heritage, being a few generations removed from enslavement and one generation removed from legal racial segregation in America, racial equality, and social justice. He is working with others to launch the Global Alliance for Indigenous People, Gender Justice, Peace, and Equality.