USA USA

Micheline Ishay is Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Human Rights and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver. She directed Korbel’s Political Theory program and was founding Director of the International Human Rights Program, which became one of the largest such programs in the world. Ishay has been a Visiting Professor at a number of universities, including: the University of Maryland, Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Khalifa University (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Tel Aviv University, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Berlin), and Sciences Po (Paris). She has been Resident Fellow at the Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation, Italy, and Visiting Fellow (Guest of the Institute), at Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna. She is a member of the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) Task Force for MENA2050 (London) and served as Vice Director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue (Paris and New York). She is the author of half a dozen books: Internationalism and Its Betrayal (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), The Nationalism Reader (Humanities Press, 1995; Prometheus, 1999), The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (2004, 2008), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present (1997, 2008, 2022), and The Levant Express: The Arab Uprisings, and the Future of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2019). The History of Human Rights and The Human Rights Reader have been translated into multiple languages and published in second or third editions, serving as standard texts on human rights around the world. Micheline Ishay has lived in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. From 2010 to 2013, she worked in the Gulf region from a unique vantage point, as a female American scholar in human rights at the time, the region was in the eye of a historical storm. At Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, She presided over the development of the social science curriculum of the University and taught several courses. She also ran Khalifa University Distinguished Speakers Series. Throughout her time in the UAE, she was invited to be a consultant to UAE high political officials, met regularly with diplomats, world leaders, scholars and journalists from the U.S., the West, and the Arab world. Regularly interviewed in the international press, Ishay frequently contributes to forums in Europe, the Middle East and the U.S. She can be contacted at micheline.ishay@du.edu.

France France

Abdolkarim Rostami is a political philosophy graduate and policy-oriented researcher working on Middle East geopolitics. He holds a B.A. in Law and an M.A. in International Affairs, as well as B.A. and M.A. degrees in Political Philosophy from Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL). His work bridges political theory and applied policy research, with a focus on regional power dynamics, strategic connectivity, and international governance. He operates in multilingual research environments and is fluent in Persian, French, and English.