James Waller

Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice

Director, Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs

Professor, Literatures, Cultures, & Languages

James Waller, Ph.D., is the inaugural Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice and director of the Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs for the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.  In addition to his faculty appointment in the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Waller also is a Visiting Scholar at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast and serves as Director of Academic Programs for the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, an international NGO devoted to atrocity prevention.

Waller is the author of six books, most notably his award-winning Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 2007), Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016), and A Troubled Sleep: Risk and Resilience in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2021).  In addition, he has published more than thirty articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, contributed over twenty chapters in edited books, and is a co-editor of Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities (Routledge, 2020).

Waller also is active in teacher training in Holocaust and genocide studies and he has consulted on exhibition development for several museums around the world.  His fieldwork has included research in Germany, Israel, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala.

Waller is an active member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars as well as the International Network of Genocide Scholars.  He also is a member of the International Expert Team of the Institute for Research of Genocide Canada and sits on several advisory boards, including World Without Genocide, the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University, the Eastern European Holocaust Studies journal of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, the Board of Scholars for Facing History & Ourselves, and the Journal of Perpetrator Research.

In 2017, Waller was the inaugural recipient of the Engaged Scholarship Prize from the International Association of Genocide Scholars in recognition of his exemplary engagement in advancing genocide awareness and prevention.  Waller has written for The Washington Post, The Irish News, and The Conversation and is frequently interviewed by broadcast and print media, including PBS, CNN, CBC, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, National Geographic, and The New York Times.