We are delighted to welcome professor Luis van Isschot - Associate Professor in the Department of History - as our Associate Chair of Latin American Studies for the academic years 2022 to 2025.
His general areas of interest include: Modern Latin America; Colombia; Human Rights; Inter-American Human Rights System; Social Movements; Violence; Authoritarianism; Revolutionary Movements.
Luis van Isschot is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in the study of social movements, political violence, and human rights. His first book The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2015 as part of their Critical Human Rights series (Spanish trans. Editorial Universidad del Rosario 2020).
His newest research, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, concerns Latin American participation in global anti-colonial networks in the 1960s and 1970s. His current book project focusses on civil society organized popular tribunals, including the Bertrand Russell Tribunal and the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, and related grassroots initiatives. Professor van Isschot is a member of a research team led by Marie-Christine Doran at the University of Ottawa working on the criminalization of protest in Latin America. Information about the Observatoire Violences, criminalisation et démocratie en Amérique latine can be found here. For more than two decades, he has been professionally concerned with human rights, conducting research and advocacy work in Latin America, North America and Africa. He has conducted research and written opinions on issues of human rights violations and crimes against humanity in Colombia for a variety of legal cases. Prior to his appointment to the University of Toronto, Luis van Isschot worked at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal, was a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York, and Assistant Professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.
Some of this selected publications include:
- Orígenes sociales de los derechos humanos: violencia y protesta en la capital petrolera de Colombia (Editorial Universidad del Rosario : 2020).
- “Assessing the Record of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Latin America’s Rural Conflict Zones (1979-2016)”, The International Journal of Human Rights.
- Rural Colombia: The Architecture of State-Sponsored Violence and New Power Configurations. (Book chapter)
- “Land, Memory and Justice: Challenges for Peace in Colombia”, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
- The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919–2010 (University of Wisconsin Press : 2015).
You can follow him on Twitter @lucho_van