Belinda Cooper

Belinda Cooper is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, where she teaches courses in human rights law, women’s rights, and transitional justice.

Cooper lived in Berlin, Germany, from 1987-1994, working closely with East German dissidents before the fall of the Berlin Wall, traveling extensively in East Germany and Eastern Europe, and following subsequent developments in the region. She returned to Berlin in 2002 as a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy. A fluent German speaker, Cooper has contributed to German-language print media, radio and television, appeared as a guest on German radio, and taken part in numerous panel discussions in Germany.

Her family background as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her experiences in Communist and post-Communist Eastern Europe contributed to Cooper’s expertise in the areas of historical memory and “transitional justice,” including war crimes tribunals, truth commissions, and other methods of coming to terms with past violence or dictatorship. She began following the work of international criminal tribunals in 1995 and edited “War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg,” which explored the interconnections between the Nuremberg tribunal and today’s international criminal courts. She has also written on Turkish society’s difficulty coming to terms with the Armenian genocide, Poland’s complex relationship with its former Jewish minority, and questions surrounding historical memory in the United States. In 2013 she worked with Turkish colleagues to organize a project on memorialization of atrocity in Turkey, which produced the website “Memorialize Turkey.” At NYU, she has led student trips to The Hague and former Yugoslavia to explore transitional and international justice issues and accompanied a trip to Rwanda on the same topics.

Cooper has taken part in women’s rights fact-finding missions to Armenia, Uzbekistan and Tanzania and coauthored reports on domestic violence in those countries. She worked with the lawyers for Murat Kurnaz, a German of Turkish origin imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was among the first lawyers to visit Guantanamo in 2004. She has written for a wide variety of print and online publications, including The New York Times, Time, World Policy Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Forward and LA Weekly, and has spoken and participated in panels at the Harvard Center for European Studies, Cardozo Law School, the New School, Israel’s Minerva Center for Human Rights, and numerous other fora. She is also a translator of German books and articles, including many works on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and a textbook on international criminal law.

Cooper holds a law degree from Yale Law School. She has taught at The New School, Brooklyn College, Ohio Northern University Law School, Seton Hall Law School and Humboldt University in Berlin. She is cofounder and president of Brooklyn Animal Action, an animal rescue non-profit.