People

Core Participating Faculty

Dr. Adam Brown
The New School for Social Research

Brown heads the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab at The New School, where he is also Vice Provost for Research. Brown’s lab focuses on studying PTSD and understanding the impacts of migration and displacement on mental health. He leads CFMDE’s intensive summer research program examining mental health issues among forcibly displaced people in Bern, Switzerland.

Marguerite Feitlowitz
Bennington College

Feitlowitz (emerita) guided Bennington Translates, a popular multilingual translation and interpretation organization, and taught multilingual courses on translation and literature. She organized the Lexicons of Migration conference in November 2022. Among many other works, Feitlowitz is the author of the internationally acclaimed A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture.

Maria Höhn
Vassar College

Hoehn (emerita) taught courses on Germany, World War II, and migration past and present. She was a founding member of the CFMDE. Among many other works, she is the co-editor of “Migration, Displacement and Higher Education: Now What?”, an open-access interdisciplinary introduction to Forced Migration Studies. 

John Hultgren
Bennington College

Hultgren teaches courses in environmental politics and policy, as well as political theory and immigration politics. He is the author of Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America. Hultgren’s research explores how efforts to protect “the environment” are mediated by social forces such as sovereignty, nationalism, race, and capitalism.

Parthiban Muniandy 
Sarah Lawrence College

In conjunction with his research on temporary labor migration in Southeast Asia and South Asia, Muniandy leads the CFMDE summer research program to Malaysia. He teaches courses in sociology, ethnography, migration, human rights. Muniandy has written several books, including Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia. 

Philipp Nielsen
Sarah Lawrence College

Nielsen is the Adda Bozeman Chair in International Relations and teaches on the intellectual, cultural, and political history of modern Europe, with particular emphasis on German and Jewish history. His research addresses the history of democracy and its relation to emotions, constitutional law, and architecture. He is the author of Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935.

Danielle Riou
Bard College - Annandale

Riou is the Associate Director of Human Rights Project and teaches courses in migration, border policy, human rights, and more. In 2022 she received the Bard Center for the Study of Hate’s Beth Rickey Award for the leadership role she took in Bard’s efforts to welcome and integrate newly arrived students from Afghanistan.

Peter Rosenblum
Bard College - Annandale 

Rosenblum teaches many courses for Bard’s Migration Initiative on topics including international law, human rights, labor migration, and more. Some of his research focuses include obligations/oversight the mining industry in South Africa and Peru as well as on tea plantations in India. Rosenblum also leads the Inclusive School Boards Initiative.   

Hanan Toukan
Bard College - Berlin

Toukan teaches courses in Middle Eastern studies, international politics, decolonial theory, contemporary art theory, and more. Her research examines the political and social roles art and culture play with a focus on the politics of knowledge production in/about the memories, displacements, racializations, histories and ecologies of Global South contexts.

Kirsten Wesselhoeft
Vassar College

Wesselhoeft teaches courses on religion, race, and migration, Islamic studies, gender studies, and ethnographic research methods. She advises Vassar’s Migration and Displacement Studies correlate sequence. Wesselhoeft is an ethnographer whose research focuses on Islam in contemporary France, ethics, and social change.