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Yasmine Ergas
Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs
Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Human Rights
Phone: 212-854-0016
ye36@columbia.edu
Biography:
Yasmine Ergas teaches courses on international law, international human rights law and gender, globalization and the human rights of women. She is the associate director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, where she leads the program on gender and the human rights of women.
Ergas is currently engaged in a study on the Transnationalization of Everyday Life, Human Rights and the Dilemmas of International Law, which examines such issues as the emergent market in reproductive surrogacy. Her previous work includes many published essays and Nelle maglie della politica: femminismo, istituzioni e politiche sociali nell’Italia degli anni settanta (Milan, 1986).
She has lectured widely including recent addresses on "Forty Years of Research on Women and Gender" to the Institut Emilie du Chatelet in Paris and on the international market in baby-making to Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She chairs an international workshop on Deconstructing and Reconstructing “Mother”: Regulating Motherhood in International and Comparative Perspective.
A graduate of the Universities of Sussex and Rome and Columbia Law School, Ergas is a former member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University; and a Pembroke Fellow of Brown University. Among other honors, she has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation and the Italian Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca.
Ergas has served on the staff of the Social Science Research Council and as a consultant to leading international organizations, including the OECD and UNESCO. She co-led a working group of the Committee on International Trade of the New York City Bar Association on child labor and international trade. She practiced law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, and Studio Legale Pedersoli.
More recently, Ergas served as the coordinator of, and an adviser to, the gender program of the Millennium Villages Project. She is an advisor to the Human Rights Commission of the City of New York, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Social Sector of the Millennium Cities Initiative, the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights Practice and the board of New York City Global Partners. Her work has been published in English, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.
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