About the Event: Professor Sanford will discuss the weaponization of the Guatemalan judicial system, gender violence and migration in a conversation about her new book Textures of Terror that investigates the unsolved murder of a female law student and the pervasive violence against Guatemalan women that drives migration. Through a father’s determined struggle and other stories of justice denied, Textures of Terror offers a deeper understanding of US Policies in Latin America and their ripple effect on migration. Professor Sanford offers an up-close appraisal of the inner workings of the Guatemalan criminal justice system and how it maintains inequality, patriarchy and impunity. Presenting the stories of other women who have suffered at the hands of strangers, intimate partners and the security forces, she reveals the deeply gendered nature of power and violence in Guatemala.

About the Speaker: A public scholar, anthropologist and internationally recognized expert on the Guatemalan Genocide, Victoria Sanford is a writer, human rights advocate and Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel & Her Father’s Quest for Justice and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. She served as an invited expert in the Spanish National Court’s genocide case against the Guatemalan generals and in an indigenous land rights case in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Bunting Peace Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has also held fellowships at the US Institute for Peace, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Fulbright Scholar awards at the Universidad Libre and Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, among others. To learn more about Victoria Sanford’s work, visit: https://www.victoriasanford.info/

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.