Victoria Sanford

Dr. Victoria Sanford received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University (2000) where she also received training in International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School.  Additionally, she received a certificate in Human Rights Law from the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica.  She has worked with Central American refugees since 1986 when she founded and directed a non-profit refugee legal services project representing Central American asylum-seekers.  As a human rights activist and scholar, she has conducted extensive field research with Maya communities in Guatemala, Afro-Colombian and indigenous peace communities in Colombia, and Colombian refugee communities in Ecuador. Her research focuses on collective memory, community reconstruction, human rights and international humanitarian law during internal armed conflicts and in post-conflict countries in Latin America and Africa. 

She is the author of Buried Secrets:  Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2003), La Masacre de Panzós:  Etnicidad, tierra y violencia en Guatemala (FyG Editores, in press), Guatemalan Non-Governmental Organizations:  A Funder’s Directory to 145 Local, Regional and National NGOs, (Shaler Adams Foundation, 1996) co-editor with Asale Angel-Ajani of Engaged Observer:  Anthropology, Advocacy and Activism (Rutgers University Press 2006) and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's report to the Commission for Historical Clarification [the Guatemalan truth commission] (FAFG 2000).  She is currently writing Morality and Survival:  Child Soldiers and Displacement in Guatemala and Colombia. 

Dr. Sanford is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including a Bunting Peace Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, a United States Institute for Peace grant, a Fulbright Teaching/Research Award, a Rockefeller Fellowship for research on violence, a MacArthur Consortium Fellowship and the Early Career Award of the Peace Society of the American Psychological Association, among others.  She was recently appointed to the Australia Research Council of Experts as an Expert of International Standing.  She has served as a consultant and provided invited expert briefings on human rights to private foundations as well as to governmental, nongovernmental and United Nations entities.  She has published and presented her work in England, Spain, Denmark, Norway, South Africa, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Slovenia, and the United States.

Dr. Sanford joined the Lehman College/City University of New York anthropology faculty in Fall 2004.  Previously, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute on Violence and Survival, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.  She has also taught in the Department of Rural and Regional Development at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, Stanford University and the University of Notre Dame where she was also appointed Faculty Fellow at the Kroc Peace Studies Institute and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.