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Victoria Sanford

Victoria Sanford - Professor - profile photo

Research Interests

  • Genocide, Feminicide, Gender Violence
  • Displacement, Migration
  • Human Rights, Humanitarian Law
  • Indigenous Rights to Ancestral Lands
  • Child Soldiers, Gangs, Organized Crime, Police in Post-Conflict Societies
  • Video Ethnography
  • Translation
  • Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico.

Education

  • Ph.D., Stanford, 2000
  • Human Rights Certificate, Inter-American Institute for Human Rights, Costa Rica
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Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Lehman College

Victoria Sanford is Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College. She is a member of the Anthropology Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center and an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, City University of New York. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She was a Bunting Peace Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University.

She is the author of Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice (University of California 2023). She is also author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2003), Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (FyG Editores 2008), La Masacre de Panzos: Etnicidad, Tierra y Violencia en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2009), Guatemala: Violencia Sexual y Genocidio (FyG Editores 2020 with Sofia Duyos Alvarez & Kathleen Dill) and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is co-editor (with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi) of Gender Violence in Peace and War ~ States of Complicity (Rutgers University Press 2016). She is also co-editor (with Asale Angel Ajani) of Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy and Activism (Rutgers University Press 2008).

Her publications in American Anthropologist, The Journal of International Peacekeeping, The Journal of Human Rights, Genocide Studies International, Political Transitions, the Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Cultural Critique, Social Justice, Latin American Perspectives and Harvard’s ReVista have examined the role of truth commissions and NGOs in community healing, local peacebuilding and justice-seeking efforts in Guatemala and Colombia as well as offered anthropological analyses of violence and genocide. She has presented and published her work in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Canada, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, South Africa, Spain, the UK, Northern Ireland, Austria, Slovenia, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, Norway, England, France, and Germany, among others. She has published opinion editorials in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, El Faro (El Salvador), Plaza Pública (Guatemala), Agencia EFE (Spain), and Billmoyers.com; and, has given some 40 interviews to radio, TV and print media in the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain – including the New York Times, PBS Evening News Hour and CNN.

A public anthropologist, in August of 2012, she served as an invited expert witness on the Guatemalan genocide before Judge Santiago Pedraz in the Spanish National Court’s international genocide case against the Guatemalan generals. She won the 2016 University of California Press Public Anthropology competition for her latest book project –The Surge~Central American Border Crossings in the United States, 1980-2015. She recently completed Bittersweet Justice: Feminicide & Impunity in Guatemala. She is the recipient of many awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Consortium Fellowship, United States Institute for Peace Fellowship, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellowship and three Fulbright Fellowships, among others.

Selected Publications:

Books:

Selected Articles and Chapters:

Selected Opinion Editorials and Letters to the Editor

Visual Anthropology

Documentary Film:

  • Colombia: Peace Communities (Producer, Director, Writer: 55 minute film

Victoria Sanford - Professor - profile photo

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Lehman College

Books

Book cover: Textures of Terror

Textures of Terror

The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father's Quest for Justice

by Victoria Sanford Professor, Anthropology

Investigating the unsolved murder of a female law student and the pervasive violence against Guatemalan women that drives migration.

Part memoir and part forensic investigation, Textures of Terror is a gripping first-person story of women, violence, and migration out of Guatemala—and how the United States is implicated. Accompanying Jorge Velásquez in a years-long search for answers after the brutal murder of his daughter Claudina Isabel, Victoria Sanford explores what it means to seek justice in "postconflict" countries where violence never ended.

Through this father's determined struggle and other stories of justice denied, Textures of Terror offers a deeper understanding of US policies in Latin America and their ripple effect on migration. Sanford offers an up-close appraisal of the inner workings of the Guatemalan criminal justice system and how it maintains inequality, patriarchy, and impunity. Presenting the stories of other women who have suffered at the hands of strangers, intimate partners, and the security forces, this work reveals the deeply gendered nature of power and violence in Guatemala.

Published May 2023
University of California Press

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gender in violence in peace and war victoria sanford

Gender Violence in Peace and War

by Victoria Sanford Professor, Anthropology

Edited and written by Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, Cecilia M. Salvi, and 12 others

Reports from war zones often note the obscene victimization of women, who are frequently raped, tortured, beaten, and pressed into sexual servitude. Yet this reign of terror against women not only occurs during exceptional moments of social collapse, but during peacetime too. As this powerful book argues, violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem -- one for which the state must be held accountable.
 
The twelve essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War present a continuum of cases where the state enables violence against women -- from state-sponsored torture to lax prosecution of sexual assault. Some contributors uncover buried histories of state violence against women throughout the twentieth century, in locations as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Others spotlight ongoing struggles to define the state's role in preventing gendered violence, from domestic abuse policies in the Russian Federation to anti-trafficking laws in the United States. 

Published April 2017
Rutgers University Press, 2016

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Del Genocidio al Feminicidio

Del Genocidio al Feminicidio

by Victoria Sanford Professor, Anthropology

De contraportada: En Guatemala, en los primeros años del siglo XXI, cada año las cifras de asesinatos de mujeres han ido en aumento; así como la saña con que tales crímenes se cometen. En este ensayo, la autora conceptualiza tal fenómeno como feminicidio, y hace una relación del mismo con el genocidio cometido en el país en contra de la población de origen maya, en la época más aguda del conflicto armado interno, que asoló al país en la segunda mitad del siglo XX.

Published January 2008
Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2008

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