Vanessa Agnew was Professor in Anglophone Studies at Universität Duisburg-Essen until 2023 and is now in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the Technische Universität Dortmund. Agnew is also Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at Australian National University, and Associate Director of Academy in Exile.

Frank Albrecht heads the division Philipp Schwartz Initiative and Academic Freedom at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, where he previously served in the Division North America, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, and in the Division Strategic Planning. Before joining the Humboldt Foundation, he held temporary assignments at United Nations Volunteers, a UNDP programme, and worked for a UK-based
recruitment consultancy, the MRL Group.

Rose Anderson is Director for Protection Services at Scholars at Risk, where she oversees SAR’s work assisting threatened scholars who are seeking placement within the SAR Network of higher education institutions. Rose joined Scholars at Risk in 2015. Prior to joining the SAR team, Rose worked with the Human Rights Advocates Program at Columbia University, a capacity-building and training program for human rights activists from around the world. Rose also worked with WITNESS, where she trained activists in using video for human rights documentation and developed training materials. Rose received her M.A. in Human Rights from Columbia University in 2014.

Stephen Best is the Rachael Anderson Stageberg Professor of English, director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, and president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Kate Bonansinga is Director, School of Art, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at University of Cincinnati, where she is also a professor and teaches courses about curatorial practice and art in public space. She was the founding director of Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Art at The University of Texas at El Paso where she curated dozens of exhibitions and established an undergraduate minor in museum studies. Bonansinga is the author of "Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border" (University of Texas Press, 2014) and of numerous articles, book chapters and exhibition publication essays, all of which address contemporary art, its meaning, and its purpose.

Dr. Eva Bosbach is the Executive Director of the University of Cologne New York Office. Born in Prague, she received both her master’s and Ph.D. degree from the University of Cologne. Prior to coming to New York, she was Program Manager at the German Rectors’ Conference in Bonn, Germany, and is author of several comparative studies about doctoral education and the humanities in Germany and the U.S. Dr. Bosbach was awarded NYC Council and NY State Assembly Honorary Citations in 2017 and currently serves on the Boards of the German Centers for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York and San Francisco.

I am working in the section "Refugee Scholar Support" of the department "International Science". Beyond that I am the coordinator of the Cologne/Bonn Academy in Exile which supports researchers from Ukraine, but also scholars at risk from Russia and Belarus.

Benedikt Brisch studied history, Slavic languages and political science at the University of Cologne. Among other positions, he was Deputy Director of the DAAD Moscow Office and Head of the Division for Europe and North America at DAAD Headquarters in Bonn, Germany. He developed the new "Future Forum" format that brings together researchers and innovators from business and industry in Germany and the U.S. In 2021 he successfully negotiated an agreement between DAAD and IIE for the “Gilman-DAAD Germany Scholarship”. This partnership between the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program and the DAAD supports a wider effort to increase and diversify international student mobility among German and American higher education
institutions.

Yana oversees research on democracy and modern authoritarianism at Freedom House, a US-based nonprofit established in 1941. Her work is focused on identifying ways to protect people living in exile from targeting by the governments of their former home countries. Yana holds a PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia and has been widely published in peer-reviewed and popular outlets. She grew up in Canada and has lived in New York since 2016.

Since April 2021 Head of Science and Technology Section at the German Embassy in Washington DC (USA). Before: Head of the Unit Climate Research and Global Change at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). 2011 to 2024 Head of Science and Technology Section at the German Embassy in Beijing (CHN).

Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research interests include political violence, eugenics, humanism, spatial segregation and forced migration, and cultural policy. Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018. Humanism in Ruins sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Currently she is working on a new project on the notion of fascist utopias in the contemporary world context.

Dan Kent is a program associate for research at the Mellon Foundation, where he leads strategic research efforts for the Higher Learning program and works on a wide variety of grantmaking portfolios, including the scholar mobility portfolio. Prior to joining Mellon, Dan worked at Research for Action in Philadelphia, focused on generating research to inform equitable higher education policy across the country. He has also lived abroad in Singapore, serving as a member of the admissions team at Yale-NUS College, one of the first liberal arts colleges in Asia. Dan has been published in outlets including University World News, International Higher Education, The Hechinger Report, Inside Higher Education, Perspectives on Urban Education Journal, and the American Educational Research Journal. He holds a BA in music and finance from William & Mary and an MSEd in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kader Konuk is a comparatist with expertise in the literary and cultural history of migration and exile. She is Professor of German literature at the TU Dortmund University. Between 2014–2023, she was professor of Turkish literary and cultural studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and between 2001–2013 an assistant professor and, subsequently, associate professor of comparative literature and German studies
at the University of Michigan.

I am Mary Ellen Heinz Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where I have also served as Director of Taft Research Center, an endowed center focused on humanities and social science research and programming. At Taft, I have worked to question notions of what counts as "human" in qualititative research and public humanities , including through Taft's new postdoctoral fellows program. I am excited to host the What We Brought With Us exhibition at UC in October 2023, which will include a symposium on the "Humanities at Risk." My own current research addresses issues of
forced displacement, exile, and memory in the context of Chile's 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup.

Marrow Professor of Psychology: New School for Social Research

Editor: Social Research
Founding Director, New University in Exile Consortium

I am an art and cultural scientist with professional experience in the development and production of exhibitions as well as the conception of entire museums from the idea to the opening. With the Exilmuseum we want to create an exeptionnal space to bring the experience of exile to life, to build a bridge from the past to today and thus to create a place of empathy for those who seek a safe refuge today.

Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee has been President of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) since 2020 and was President of the Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) from 2009 to 30.09.2023. Since Oct. 1, 2023, he has been rector of the University of Cologne. The professor of English linguistics already held the office of DAAD vice president from 2012 to 2019. For his services to international cooperation between universities, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ion Ionescu de la Brad University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine (USAMV) Iasi, Romania, and an honorary doctorate from Ivane Javakhishvili University Tbilisi (TSU) in Georgia.

Priya S. Nayar serves as the Executive Director of University Alliance Ruhr in North America—a consortium comprising TU Dortmund University, Ruhr University Bochum, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. In her role leading the New York office since 2021, Priya is dedicated to advancing academic collaborations among these institutions and a growing network of partners in the United States and Canada.

Egemen Özbek is the academic coordinator of Academy in Exile at TU Dortmund, where he supports scholars, journalists, and cultural producers at risk to continue their work in Germany. He is also a researcher specializing in the politics of memory, with a particular emphasis on the Armenian genocide and commemorations.

I am a Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego and the founder of our campus SAR project, where we have hosted four scholars over the last six years. I am a Board member of the US Section of Scholars at Risk.

Lauren Raskin leads the State Department’s efforts to combat transnational repression (TNR) through coordination with U.S. agencies, partner governments, and civil society organizations. She is a dedicated policy advisor and attorney experienced in promoting human rights and justice. She graduated from the University of Michigan and Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

James Robin King is Director of IIE-SRF and has worked with the program since 2011. A former Fulbright fellow in Jordan, James holds an M.A. in Islamic studies from Columbia University. He has published extensively on Yemen and is also the co-author of two studies published by IIE and the University of California, Davis that focus on the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on higher education in Lebanon and Turkey. Prior to working at IIE-SRF, James worked on a state stabilization initiative in Yemen and on a project to measure the quality of governance within contemporary Muslim-majority states. He lives in NYC with his wife and 2 amazing kiddos.

Annika Roux is a member of Academy in Exile's production team, where she has managed the website,contributed to conference organizing, the e-learning video series, the layout of publications, and co-curated exhibitions. She is a student at Freie Universität Berlin, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in media and communication studies and a master’s degree in Romance literature with a focus on Spanish and Portuguese philology.

I make humanities and social justice grants in higher learning at the Mellon Foundation, where I steward the portfolio in global academic freedom and scholar mobility, among several others. I am an Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College (currently on leave), where I was the founding director of the Center for Experimental Humanities and its related academic concentration for eight years. My individual research engages Anglo-American literature and popular culture through childhood studies, gender and sexuality studies, media studies, medieval studies, and race and ethnicity, and my public humanities work includes serving as a National Project Scholar for the American Library Association’s Great Stories Club, a US-wide reading and discussion program for underserved youth.

Born and raised in Iran, Neda Soltani was forced into a life of political exile in Germany in the summer of 2009. She was the recipient of a Scholar Rescue Fund fellowship in 2012 due to her academic work in Iran. In 2019, she switched from academic work to science management and became the lead officer for protection and advocacy for at-risk and displaced scholars at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Nicole Tuszynski is the Associate Director of the New University in Exile Consortium based at The New School in New York City. In her role, she engages the Consortium's global network of higher education institutions to support endangered scholars and works to help create a welcoming and supportive intellectual community among them Previously, she was the Senior Manager of the Lawyer's Network at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Nicole holds a masters degree in human rights studies from New York University.

Yoan Vilain is Vice-Provost for International and European Affairs at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and visiting law professor at Sciences Po Paris and Strasbourg. His research encompasses German, French, European and comparative constitutional law, methodology of comparative Law, with special attention to questions of state organisation and federal theory. He has received several scientific prizes, among others the German-French Parliamentary Prize awarded by the Assemblée nationale and the Bundestag. He serves on numerous scientific committees and academic boards and has been elected to the board of the German Academic Exchange Service.

Supporting professional development in the international knowledge-sector, particularly in the socialsciences.

Sarah Willcox is Deputy Director of Scholars at Risk with responsibility for SAR’s internal operations, administration, and programming, including SAR’s protection, advocacy, and membership teams. Before SAR, Sarah had over 15 years of progressive responsibility at IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF), ultimately as senior director, and before that three years with the Fulbright program. She has advised in the establishment of a number of scholar protection programs in the US and Europe and served on the steering committees of various advocacy organizations including the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) and the University Alliance for At-Risk Migrants and Refugees (UARRM). She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.