Doug Boyd

Director, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky

Doug Boyd Ph.D. directs the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and is a recognized leader regarding oral history, archives, and digital technologies. He recently managed the Oral History in the Digital Age website, which was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The project established current best practices for collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories. Boyd currently leads the team that envisioned, designed, and is implementing the open-source Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) system, which synchronizes text with audio and video online. He holds a PhD in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University and previously served as the manger of the Digital Program for the University of Alabama Libraries, Director of the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and Senior Archivist for the oral history and folklife collections at the Kentucky Historical Society. He authors the blog Digital Omnium: Oral History, Archives and Digital Technologies, and is the author of the book Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community published in August 2011 by the University Press of Kentucky.

Elisabeth Baumgartner

Head of Swisspeace’s Dealing with the Past program

Since 2011 Elisabeth has been the head of swisspeace’s Dealing with the Past program.
One of the projects of this program is called “Archives and Dealing with the Past”.
The goal of this project is to make a significant contribution to preserving, securing and making accessible archives and records of past human rights violations in countries that have experienced gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law and to raise the awareness on the importance of archives and data collections of human rights violations within a broader understanding of dealing with the past initiatives.

Iratxe Momoitio Astorkia

Director of the Gernika Peace Museum

Iratxe has been Director of the Gernika Peace Museum (unique peace museum in the Basque Country and Spain) since its creation in the year 1998. She has published several articles about Memory, the bombing of Gernika and the Spanish Civil War, about the importance of Art and Peace and about the Gernika Peace Museum in different books and magazines (from Spain and other countries).
She is involved in several International Networks and has been commissioned to participate on an expert group (2012) to design the content and viability of the “Instituto de la Memoria” (Institute of Memory) in the Basque Country.

Louise Corti

Associate Director at UK Data Archive

Louise is an Associate Director and heads the UK Data Service functional areas of Collections Development and Producer Relations. The Collections Development team work to ensure that the most useful data are acquired and made available via the Service, using robust appraisal criteria. The Producer Relations arm works with data producers to ensure that high quality data are created, ensuring that, for example, ESRC grant applicants and award holders gain good advice on creating shareable data and share their data in a timely manner. Louise leads the new Digital Futures project, which is a culmination of bringing together digitally enhanced high quality older data sources with high profile users. She also coordinates the international working group on metadata standards for qualitative data.

Norman Duncan

Lead Researcher, Apartheid Archive Project

Norman Duncan holds a professorship in Psychology, and Vice-Principal/ Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at the University of Pretoria, and former Dean of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.  He obtained his qualifications in Psychology from the University of the Western Cape and the Université Paul Valérie (France). His research and publications are primarily in the fields of racism and community psychology. He has co-edited a range of volumes, including ‘Race’, Racism, Knowledge Production and Psychology in South Africa. He currently serves as one of the lead researchers on the Apartheid Archives Research Project, a cross-disciplinary, cross-national study of the enduring effects of apartheid-era racism on people’s lives currently.

Patricia Tappatá Valdez

Professor of Transitional Justice at Buenos Aires University

Patricia Tappatá Valdez has worked since 1974 for the defence of human rights in Peru, El Salvador and Argentina. She is currently the head of the Directorate in charge of the relationship with civil society organizations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Argentina. She is also a member of the faculty of the LLM in International Human Rights at the Faculty of Law at the University of Buenos Aires.  Until June 2012 she was Director of Memoria Abierta (Open Memory), an organization she created and led in its development for over ten years. Memoria Abierta is an alliance of five Argentine Human Rights Organizations working together to preserve, organize, and exhibit the documented history of state terrorism in Argentina with the goal of encouraging public policy oriented to recuperate and examine the memory of the recent past as part of the cultural, social, and political identity of the nation.

Patricia Tappatá was the Director of the Truth Commission for El Salvador, created as part of the peace agreements signed in that country between the Government and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and implemented by the United Nations, which investigated the twelve-year war in that country. She also directed the Human Rights Department of the National Conference of Bishops in Peru, 1977-1987, and co- founding the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos in Perú, integrating its first Executive Committee (1985-1987).

She directed the Political Representation Program at the Fundación Poder Ciudadano in Argentina, 1993-1997. For three years, she also coordinated a regional program on Social Responsability and Leadership (LIP Program: Leadership in Philanthropy in the Americas) developed by the Kellogg Foundation in seven Latin American countries. She is one of the founding members of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and currently serves on its board. She is also on the Advisory Board at “Archives and Dealing with the Past” project (Swis Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Federal Archives and Swisspeace).

Tappatá Valdez is the author of several articles and book contributions about human rights, and is an expert in Human Rights issues, Memory and Democracy. She holds a degree in Social Work at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and completed his postgraduate studies in Social Sciences at FLACSO-Buenos Aires (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales).

Ramsay Liem

Professor Emeritus at Boston College

Ramsay Liem is professor emeritus of psychology and visiting scholar at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College.
He served as co-coordinator for the Asian American Studies Program, continues to teach a seminar on Culture, Identity, and Asian American Experience, and mentors student organizations e.g. the Asian Caucus and Korean Student Association.
He is responsible for the oral history project Korean American Memories of the Korean War and served as project director for the multi-media exhibit, Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War” (www.stillpresentpasts.org). The documentary film, “Memory of Forgotten War”, is the most recent product of his work on Korean American legacies of the Korean War.
Liem also works on related issues outside the university with organizations devoted to U.S.-Korea relations, Korean reconciliation and unification, Asian American media arts, and human rights and mental health.

Roberta Bacic

Curator of International Exhibitions of Arpilleras

Roberta taught at Universidad Austral de Chile from 1973 to 1981. From 1982 she worked in Carlos Anwandter German Institute and San Mateo College both in Chile. Between 1993 and 1996, she worked for the National Corporation of Reparation and Reconciliation, the successor to the Truth Commission. During this time she also taught in Human Rights at the Catholic University, Temuco, Chile. She then moved to the United Kingdom and took up the position of Programme and Development Officer for War Resisters’ International where she worked between 1998 and 2002. She moved to Northern Ireland in 2004.
Since 2008, Roberta has curated more than 50 international exhibitions of arpilleras. Over time, these exhibitions have expanded from arpilleras from Pinochet’s Chile, to include expressions of loss, protest and healing from around the world.

Verne Harris

Director of Research and Archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation

Verne is Director of Research and Archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation and was Mandela’s archivist from 2004 to 2013.
He is an honorary research fellow with the University of Cape Town, participated in a range of structures which transformed South Africa’s apartheid archival landscape, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and is a former Deputy Director of the National Archives.
Widely published, he is probably best-known for leading the editorial team on the best-seller Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself.
He is the recipient of archival publication awards from Australia, Canada and South Africa, and both his novels were short-listed for South Africa’s M-Net Book Prize.
He has served on the Boards of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Freedom of Expression Institute, and the South African History Archive.

Vesna Teršelič

Director of the Center for Dealing with the Past, Documenta

Vesna Teršelič is Director of Center for Dealing With the Past, Documenta.  Documenta – was founded by the Centre for Peace, Non-Violence and Human Rights, Osijek, the Centre for Peace Studies, the Civic Committee for Human Rights and the Croatian Helsinki Committee as an attempt to encourage the process of dealing with the past, establish factual truth about the war and contribute to a shifting of the discussion from the level of dispute over facts (the number of killed people, etc.) towards a dialogue on interpretations. Since its establishment Documenta has contributed to the development of individual and social process of dealing with the past, in order to build a sustainable peace in Croatia and the region by deepening the dialogue and initiating a public debate on public policies that encourage dealing with the past, collecting data, publishing research on war events, war crimes and violations of human rights, and monitoring war crimes trials at the local and regional level as a contribution to the improvement of court standards and practices in the war crimes trials. In order to achieve its goals, Documenta cooperates with its founding organizations, associations of families of the missing people, other civic initiatives, governmental institutions, international institutions and organizations, institutions of state and local government, academic institutions, religious groups, the media and other interested individuals.
As a peace activist Vesna founded the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia and in 1998, she was joint recipient of the Right Livelihood Award along with Katarina Kruhonja of the Centre for Peace, Non-violence and Human Rights, Osijek.