Keynote Speaker Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale and was from 1980 to 2016 Professor of History and German and from 2000 to 2016 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University. His publications have won several prizes and been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish. His works on the Holocaust include Why? Explaining the Holocaust (2017), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010) that he edited with John K. Roth; and German Railroads, Jewish Souls (2020), a study of deportation trains that he and Christopher Browning assembled around two path-breaking essays by the late Raul Hilberg. He has just completed a book entitled Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust, which will appear in both English and German in 2025. From 2014 to 2019, Hayes chaired the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on which he served for a total of twenty years. An award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.ow of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Imperial War Museum, and Fund For Teachers, as well as a Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching recipient; in each instance his work focused on various aspects of Holocaust and genocide education. Gudgel spent six years working for the USHMM as a member of the Regional Education Corps. He co-founded the Educators Institute for Human Rights with his colleague, Drew Beiter, and served as the organization’s executive director for six years.  Presently, Gudgel’s research centers around documenting and preserving Sarajevo Roses, primary resources from the Siege of Sarajevo, and how teachers around the United States teach about genocide. 

Danny M. Cohen, PhD. is a learning scientist and writer. A distinguished professor of instruction at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy, Danny specializes in Holocaust memory and education design. He is the author of the choose-your-own-pathway mystery THE 19^TH WINDOW and the historical novel TRAIN, a selected text of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Danny is the founder of Unsilence and is co-chair of the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission. He is also a member of the folk-rock band They Won’t Win.

Dr. Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ohio State. She has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters about genocide, transitional justice, and human rights. She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crimes and the Editor in Chief of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Policy Brief Initiative. Dr. Nyseth Nzitatira conducts atrocity forecasting for the U.S. government and runs an education abroad program in Rwanda. She is currently writing a book on the reintegration of Rwandans who were incarcerated for committing genocide and is the 2023 recipient of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Engaged Scholar Award. She has also been awarded Ohio State’s highest teaching honor, created and runs Ohio State’s Certificate Program on Holocaust and Genocide Education, and consults with museums and nonprofits regarding genocide education and prevention.

Sara E. Brown, Ph.D. is the Regional Director of American Jewish Committee San Diego. She holds the first Ph.D. in comparative genocide studies from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She was a director of Chhange, a Holocaust, human rights, and genocide education non-profit and managed post-secondary education programming for USC Shoah Foundation. Sara has taught courses on history, human rights and mass violence, conducted genocide-related research in Rwanda, and served as a project coordinator in refugee camps in Tanzania. Sara is the author of Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Perpetrators and Rescuers and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide. She has consulted for a number of international organizations, including the United Nations. 

Dr. Mark Gudgel is an eighteen-year veteran of teaching English, Humanities, and Genocide Studies in the public schools. Presently, he serves as assistant professor of education at the College of Saint Mary in Omaha. Gudgel is a fellow of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Imperial War Museum, and Fund For Teachers, as well as a Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching recipient; in each instance his work focused on various aspects of Holocaust and genocide education. Gudgel spent six years working for the USHMM as a member of the Regional Education Corps. He co-founded the Educators Institute for Human Rights with his colleague, Drew Beiter, and served as the organization’s executive director for six years.  Presently, Gudgel’s research centers around documenting and preserving Sarajevo Roses, primary resources from the Siege of Sarajevo, and how teachers around the United States teach about genocide. 

Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and directs the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at the Claremont Colleges (CA, USA). She chairs the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has published several books on the Holocaust in Ukraine including Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), and co-editor (with Ray Brandon) of Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (2008). Her work on gender and the Holocaust, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been translated into 23 languages. Lower’s The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed (2021) was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize, longlisted for a PEN and won the National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust category).

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Study, New York University. Mouradian is the author of the award-winning book The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (2021). He is the co-editor of After the Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience (2023) and The I.B.Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy (forthcoming in 2024). 

Dr. Elizabeth R. Baer serves as Research Professor of English and African Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is currently working at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, doing research for the Senior Historian Division. In 2016-2017, Dr. Baer held the position of Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey where she taught courses on Holocaust literature, Women and the Holocaust, and on the Herero Genocide.

She has published five books on the topics of war, gender, and genocide, most recently

The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, the focus of her talk for the HERC Institute.

Bradley W. Hart is the author of two books, including the award-winning Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States. He is also a frequent media commentator, public speaker, and recently became a podcaster. Hart earned his BA in history and philosophy at California State University, Fresno, his M.Litt in modern history at the University of St. Andrews, and his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. 

Dr. Korieh’s research and teaching focus on social and economic change in colonial Africa. He has taught at the University of Nigeria and currently teaches African History at Marquette University. He was an Adjunct Peace and Conflict Program professor at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is also a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He has published over 100 articles and essays in academic journals and scholarly collections and authored, edited, or co-edited 18 volumes including The Land Has Changed: History, Society and Gender in Colonial Eastern Nigeria (2012); “Life Not Worth Living”: Nigerian Petitions Reflecting an African Society’s Experiences During World War II (2014); The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (2012); Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society and Atlantic Diaspora Connections (2009); Gendering Global Transformations: Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity (2009); and Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa (2007). His most recent books are Nigeria and World War: Empire, Colonialism and Global Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020), New Perspectives on the Nigeria-Biafra War: No Victor, No Vanquished (Lexington Books, 2021), and Chinua Achebe and the Igbo-African World: Between Fiction, Fact, and Historical Representation (Lexington Books, 2022). Dr. Korieh is a fellow of the African Studies Center, Leiden, Netherlands, and a British Academy Fellow at the University of Oxford. He was a past president of the Igbo Studies Association and the founding editor of Igbo Studies Review and Nigerian Studies Review.