U of M prof elected president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars

At the 12th Meeting of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) in Yerevan, Armenia, University of Manitoba sociology professor Andrew Woolford was elected president.

An expert on Canadian settler-colonial genocide, Woolford is the author of This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in Canada and the United States (2015, University of Manitoba Press and University of Nebraska Press) and co-editor of Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (2014, Duke).

In his inaugural speech at a ceremony, attended by Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Woolford spoke about further internationalizing IAGS to reach members in the Global South, as well as the Indigenous peoples of the world. Woolford later participated in a ceremonial tree planting at the Armenian genocide complex to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the onset of the Armenian genocide.

Woolford notes that “while my election should not be received as an endorsement that all genocide scholars agree with my work on genocide in Canada, it does demonstrate that discussion of settler-colonial genocide in Canada has reached a level of legitimacy whereby a scholar working in this area can be elected president of the world’s largest association of genocide scholars.”

Also at the Yerevan conference, Adam Muller, a professor of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, was elected to the IAGS advisory board.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars is a global, interdisciplinary, non-partisan organization that seeks to further research and teaching about the nature, causes, and consequences of genocide, and advance policy studies on genocide prevention. The association, founded in 1994, meets regularly to consider comparative research, important new work, case studies, the links between genocide and other human rights violations, and prevention and punishment of genocide. The association holds biennial conferences and co-publishes the scholarly journal Genocide Studies and Prevention. A central aim of the Association is to draw academics, activists, artists, genocide survivors, journalists, jurists, public policy makers and other colleagues into the interdisciplinary study of genocide, with the goal of prevention. Membership is open to interested people worldwide.