Executive Committee
Bios
Brett Kaufman
BRETT KAUFMAN (co-chair) is Associate Professor of the Classics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is an historian of the Middle East as well as an archaeologist, Semitic languages specialist, and archaeometallurgist. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Getty Research Institute. U of I’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences recognized him with the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors award, and the Helen Corley Petit Scholarship. He has directed or supervised archaeological excavations in Tunisia, China, Italy, Israel, and New York, and has published his research in the top archaeology journals, including Current Anthropology, Antiquity, Journal of Archaeological Science, Archaeometry, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, American Journal of Archaeology, and Science, among others. He is the founding managing editor of the peer-reviewed archaeological science journal Advances in Archaeomaterials, and the president of the Archaeological Institute of America-Central Illinois Chapter. His work confronting discrimination on campuses since October 7 has included an article in Fathom, organizing the conference “Antisemitism on the American Campus”, and publishing a chapter exposing academic fraud targeting Jews. With co-chair Cary Nelson, he was awarded the “Campus Heroes” award by StandWithUs and Mothers Against College Antisemitism.
Cary Nelson
CARY NELSON (co-chair) is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He taught at Illinois from 1970-2006, including seminars on Holocaust poetry. He was national president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) from 2006-2012, after serving as vice-president the six previous years . He is presently Chair of the Alliance for Academic Freedom (AAF). He is the author of over 400 articles and the author or editor of 36 books. His op eds have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other venues. Among his publications are 6 books at the intersection of antisemitism, academic freedom, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (coed, 2015), Dreams Deferred: A Concise Guide to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict & the Movement to Boycott Israel (2015), Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & The Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (2019), Not In Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities (2021), Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (coed, 2021), Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (2024). He also has a number of books about modern poetry and about the politics and economics of higher education. His work is the subject of an edited collection, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. At UIUC he has served on the LAS Executive Committee, the Campus Committee on Promotion and Tenure, and the Faculty Senate. He has been continuously active in the struggle against academic boycotts in several disciplinary associations since the 2006-2007 academic year. He has given presentations about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and antisemitism at numerous universities and associations in Britain, Canada, Israel, and the US. He is a Research Fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) and a steering committee member and Senior Research Fellow at The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). He holds an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Tania Ionin
TANIA IONIN is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focus is on formal, experimental approaches to second language acquisition and the syntax/semantics interface. She has worked on a variety of languages, including English, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Hebrew, and has published her research in major journals in language acquisition and formal linguistics, including Second Language Research, Language Learning, Linguistic Inquiry and Glossa, among others; she is also an associate editor for the journal Language Acquisition. She has previously been recognized by UIUC as a University Scholar and a Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar. She has published three co-authored books: Cardinals: The syntax and semantics of cardinal-containing expressions (MIT Press, 2018); Second language acquisition: Introducing intervention research (Cambridge University Press, 2023); and The acquisition of Russian as a second language: A research overview (Routledge, 2026), and is one of three co-editors of The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Morphosyntax, and Semantics (2024).
Irena Levitan
IRENA LEVITAN, is a Professor of Medicine and Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her PhD in Biophysics and Neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1994 and completed postdoctoral training at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and Institute for Medicine and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2005 and served as a faculty member at UIC since then. She is currently Professor and Associate Head of Research in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Levitan main interest can be defined as “vascular biophysics”, investigating the biophysical basis of vascular function. She made multiple contributions to the field, particularly to our understanding of lipid-protein interactions in the regulation of ion channels and of endothelial biomechanics and mechanotransduction. Studies of her group combine computational and experimental approaches, and span across multi-disciplinary fields combining biophysics and molecular biology, generating new animal models and working with human patients. She was named a Guyton Distinguished Lecturer “for her quantitative and biophysical work on cholesterol modulation of ion channels and how this can affect integrated organ function”. She is also an Elected Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering for “outstanding contributions to our understanding of lipid-ion channel interactions, cellular biomechanics and vascular dysfunction under dyslipidemia”. More recently, she was also awarded a UIC Team-Science award for transdisciplinary collaborations: “spanning the divide between cellular and molecular biology to human vascular physiology”. She is also an Elected Fellow of the American Society for Physiology, Cardiovascular section. Dr. Levitan has served on numerous grant review panels at NIH, both as a chartered and as an ad hoc member. She also served as a lead editor for the series Current Trends in Membranes (Elsevier), editing or facilitating multiple volumes ranging from Cell Membrane Repair to Ion Channels in Cancer. Currently, she serves on several editorial boards, including ATVB, BBA membranes, Science Reposrts. Her vision is to facilitate the interdisciplinary studies in Vascular Physiology, support junior and under-represented scientists.
Steven Roth
STEVEN ROTH is the Michael Reese Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of
Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is Vice Head of Research and Faculty Affairs in the
Department of Anesthesiology at UIC, and Professor Emeritus of Anesthesia at the
University of Chicago. As well as his clinical work, he runs a research lab which
currently focuses on developing engineered nanoparticles for therapeutics. During his
career, Dr. Roth has garnered over $20M in funding from the National Institutes of
Health and from numerous foundations for his research. His honors include election to
the Association of University Anesthesiologists, Fellow of the Association for Research
in Vision and Ophthalmology, Faculty of the Year Award, Keser Shem Tov (“good
name”) award from the Chicago Center for Torah and Chesed, and Shine A Light
Foundation Civic Courage Award. He has served on numerous national committees
including as the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the American Society of
Anesthesiologists (ASA), and Chair of the ASA Task Force on Perioperative Blindness.
Since 2023, Dr. Roth’s has applied his scientific expertise into study of antisemitism in
academic medicine, resulting in ongoing publications in medical journals on this subject.
Richard Ross
RICHARD J. ROSS is the David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder and director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History. Every two years, the Symposium presents a conference that gathers law professors, historians, and social scientists to discuss a particular topic in comparative legal history (c.1492-1815). His research has focused primarily on the development of early American law in a comparative, Atlantic world context. He is the co-editor, with Brian Owensby, of Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (2018); and with Lauren Benton, of Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (2013). Active in the American Society for Legal History, he has twice been appointed to the executive committee of the Board of Directors. He serves/has served on the editorial boards of Comparative Legal History, Law and History Review, and Law and Society Review. He has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University Law School (May 2012) and Tel Aviv University Law School (May-June 2015). In spring 2019, he was a visiting scholar in a research group on “Rethinking Early Modern Jewish Legal Culture: New Sources, Methodologies and Paradigms” at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University. At UIUC, he serves on the Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Jewish and Campus Life.
Helaine Silverman
HELAINE SILVERMAN is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a past editor of the top-ranked journal, Latin American Antiquity, and serves/has served on the editorial boards of International Journal of Heritage Studies, Heritage & Society, American Anthropologist, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology and World Art. She is a member of the advisory boards of ICOMOS-USA and Illinois State Historical Society. She is a past advisor to the Culture and Rights Project of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn
Anthropology Centre of Silpakorn University, Bangkok (2009-2013). In 2011 she served on the expert panel on “Cultural Rights as Human Rights” convened by the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva. She is an affiliate of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2016 she received the University of Illinois’ Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement. Much of her recent research focuses on how the past is used and misused in the present in politicized cultural heritage conflicts and the tension between heritage claims and history in the production of national identity. In addition to her authored articles, she is the editor/co-editor of seven volumes on heritage themes: Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (Springer, 2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (Springer, 2009), Contested Cultural Heritage (Springer, 2011), Cultural Heritage Politics in China (Springer, 2013), Encounters with Popular Pasts (Springer, 2015), Heritage in Action (Springer, 2017) and Heritage of Death (Routledge, 2018).