Faculty

Instruction in the Institute is provided by internationally recognized leaders and educators who have made large theoretical, academic, activist and policy contributions in the area of women’s human rights and citizenship.

Core Faculty

Alda Facio, LLP, Founder & Academic Director of the Institute

Alda is a feminist human rights activist, jurist and writer. As one of the founders of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court, she went on to be its first Director. In 1996, she was awarded the first Women’s Human Rights Award from International Women, Law and Development in Washington D.C. She is currently the Director of the Women, Gender and Justice Program at the U.N. Latin American Institute for Crime Prevention in Costa Rica.

Shanthi Dairiam, MA

Shanthi is an internationally renowned expert and activist in women’s human rights, a former CEDAW committee member (2005-2008), and has served as a women’s rights expert for key UN agencies such as UNDP, The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNIFEM and UNICEF. She has provided technical services to governments in the Asia Pacific Region, Africa and Latin America assisting them to build capacity for the implementation of CEDAW.  In 1993 she founded the International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific, a regional and international independent, non-profit global NGO, based in Malaysia, which monitors and facilitates the implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against (CEDAW). She engages in women’s human rights education and training around the world, and has been named  the next Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education at OISE/UT.

Mary Eberts, B.A., LL.B, LL.M., L.S.M.

Mary is a co-founder of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), Canada’s premier organization litigating women’s equality test cases, and was the first head of its National Legal Committee.~ Since 1991, she has been counsel to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, in its work for constitutional equality for Aboriginal women and against violence.~She writes, lectures and teaches in Canada and abroad, on women’s equality, and the wide recognition of her work includes Canada’s Governor-General’s Gold Medal in Honour of the Person’s Case.    

Angela Lytle, M.Ed.

Angela is an educator with many years experience teaching, facilitating workshops and developing educational programming and curriculum in international settings. Angela has worked with Alda Facio and the Women, Gender and Justice Program in Costa Rica and has been a resource person with IWRAW-APs ‘Global to Local Program’ for NGO representatives at the CEDAW committee. She lived in South Korea for several years, where she engaged in educational and activist work supporting survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, as well as working with the Korean Women’s Associations United.  She has been involved with the Women’s Human Rights Education Institutes since its inception in 2004 and is now the Executive Director. She is also pursuing her PhD with a research focus on women’s human rights and embodied learning.

Angela Miles, PhD

Angela is a Professor in the Adult Education and Community Development Program at OISE/UT with a research and activist interest in feminist theory and feminism as an increasingly global social justice politics, author of Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions.  She is co-founder of the Women’s Human Rights Education Institutes.

Martha Morgan, J.D.

Martha Morgan, JD,  is the Robert S. Vance Professor Emerita of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law where she teaches courses in domestic/comparative constitutional and human rights law. Her research and writing interests include women and constitution-making, comparative gender jurisprudence, and the domestication of international gender norms. She serves as a resource person/trainer for the International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific’s Global to Local Program, an NGO mentoring program which assists women’s groups in countries reporting to the CEDAW Committee.

Additional Faculty

Debbie Danard, PhD

Debby Danard, PhD is Anishinaabe-Ojibway.  She is a community leader, academic and activist developing traditional knowledge-based methods of addressing high suicide rates among First Nations living on and off reserve in Canada.  Debby is also a traditional teacher and brings her vision of Indigenous worldview to participants in this institute hosted on traditional First Nations land.

Denisse Temin Rosenfeld, M.A.

Denisse Temin Rosenfeld is a passionate Mexican, queer immigrant feminist dedicated to supporting and participating in the social, economic, and political processes of change surrounding women. She has a Master of Arts degree in Gender and Peace Building that she received in 2005 from the United Nations mandated University for Peace.  Denisse worked in Turkey with Dr. Yakin Erturk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, as well as Kaos GL, a Turkish lgbtiq organization. Denisse collaborated with the UK Women’s National Commission in researching, drafting, and editing the country’s 2007 CEDAW shadow report, and has also worked with Canadians for Choice where she conducted research on diversity and how it affects access to sexual and reproductive rights in Canada. She is currently working as the women’s community development coordinator at the AIDS Committee of Toronto.