Student Tribune

Expert on Evil, Genocide, and Race Coming to MCC

Please join MCC's Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project for its 27th annual Kristallnacht program, at which the lessons of the past remind us of contemporary obligations. This year, the Project is proud to welcome Dr. James Waller as its keynote speaker. Drawing on over two decades of primary research and scholarship from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, Waller's latest text, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide, is grounded in the belief that preventing mass atrocity is an achievable goal, but only if we have the collective will to do so.

Waller is professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire, which offers the only undergraduate program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the U.S. With an extensive teaching background in comparative genocide, Waller also serves as Director of Academic Programs with the Auschwitz Institute of Peace and Reconciliation. In this role, he also teaches and develops curriculum for the Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention, and he educates and trains in genocide prevention for the US Army command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Waller also has delivered briefings on genocide prevention and perpetrator behavior for the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the CIA Directorate of Intelligence, and the International Human Rights Unit of the FBI. He has trained teachers in Holocaust and genocide studies for the past decade and consulted on exhibition development with the National Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda. His fieldwork has included research in Germany, Israel, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala. Waller's 2007 book, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, is a standard text for students of genocide throughout the United States. He is widely recognized for his work on intergroup relations and prejudice, and in 1996 developed a study program titled "Prejudice Across America." The program drew national media attention and was named by President Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race as one of America's "Promising Practices for Racial Reconciliation." Many of the experiences from the study program are chronicled in Dr. Waller's first book, Face to Face: The Changing State of Racism Across America; and in a second book, Prejudice Across America. He has lectured at more than 50 colleges and universities as well as being frequently interviewed by media sources such as PBS, CNN, CBC, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Salon, and the New York Times.

Downtown Campus
Monday, November 5, 2018 • 12 noon
High Falls A/B (320A/B)
Public parking in lot CC

Monday, November 5, 2018 • 7pm
R. Thomas Flynn Campus Center, Warshof Conference Center, Monroe A/B
Public parking in lot M

Both presentations are open to the public. Free tickets are available online.

Fabbro, Regina
Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project
10/26/2018