The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention

Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention

Professor Schiff works with AUP faculty, students and the broader research community to provide cross-disciplinary scholarship on the contributions of the archives to the possibility of enduring peace and understanding. Read Brian's full bio here.  

Assistant Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention.

As a historian, Constance contributes to the scientific agenda of the Center. She defended her Ph.D. in History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes an Sciences Sociales in 2017. Her research, entitled “The Everlastingness of our People”: An American Jewish Socialist Aid in the Yiddish Diaspora, the Jewish Labor Committee in Postwar France (1944-49)”, focuses on the transnational relation between Yidish speaking socialists – mainly Bundists and left wing Zionists – in America and France in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and deals with social work, displacement and migration of Holocaust survivors, Yiddish culture, identity, memory, politics and labor during the early Cold War.

Her current research concerns are Holocaust memory in Yiddish and the use of testimonies in historical research on mass violence. Read Constance's full bio here.

Administrator and Communications Coordinator of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention. Kelly also supervises the viewing of the Archives at AUP and assists in research projects. She holds a JD, an LLM in International Comparative Law (Trinity College Dublin), and she completed her MA in International Affairs at AUP in 2019 and has worked in several legal environments.

Professor El Khoury earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2016. She previously taught at Tufts University as Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Literature, before returning to Paris and joining AUP in 2024 as Assistant Professor of French Studies. She is also a clinical psychologist, having completed her Master 2 in Clinical Psychology at Université Paris Cité in 2026. Read Mona’s full bio here.

Professor of International Law, Sharon Weill joined The American University of Paris in 2018, where she directs the Justice Lab. In 2022, she was nominated as a Research Associate at the Centre for Comparative Law & the Internationalization of Law at Sorbonne University. Alongside these roles, she teaches at the master’s programs of Sciences Po Paris and Paris II University. She holds a PhD from the Law Faculty of the University of Geneva (2012), and her postdoctoral research was conducted at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley (2015-2016). She is a member of the Law and Society Association (LSA), the Onati Center for Socio-Legal Studies and the International Law Association (ILA). In addition to her academic work, she served as an expert member of the French National Consultative Commission for Human Rights (CNCDH) (2018-2021) and as a judge in the French Asylum Court (UNHCR nomination, 2019-2022).. Read Sharon’s full bio here.

Zed Zhipeng Gao is a political psychologist who approaches China and Chinese diaspora from interdisciplinary perspectives. His dissertation was on the history of psychology in Chinese communist movement. In this project, he examines how psychologists, when caught in the Cold War confrontation, national plan for economic development, malfunctioning bureaucracy, and ideological indoctrination, contributed to an inflated mass belief in human agency which in turned fueled the tragic unravel of the cultural revolution. More recently, Gao has been studying Chinese diaspora amid international conflict. In a journal special issue Theorizing the Psychology of Deglobalization that he co-edited, Gao discusses Chinese immigrants’ experience of “double unbelonging” that stems from both racism in the host country and nationalist exclusion from China. In another ongoing work, Gao analyzes how a persecuted and exiled religious organization, while continuing its protest against the Chinese authoritarian state, transmorphed into a major force in the right wing of North American politics.