Ms. Liz Sevcenko

Rutgers University - Newark

Liz Ševčenko is founding director of the Humanities Action Lab, a growing consortium of over 30 universities issue organizations and public spaces, led from Rutgers University-Newark, that collaborate to develop student- and community-curated public memory projects around contested social issues. HAL’s latest project is Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice, a traveling exhibit, web platform, and public actions confronting histories of environmental racism and their legacies for the climate crisis, created by over 500 students and frontline community leaders across the hemisphere Previous projects included States of Incarceration: A National Dialogue of Local Histories, which inspired the Rikers Public Memory Project, a collaboration with Just Leadership USA and Create Forward, and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, an international collaboration of universities and organizations Ševčenko launched from Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Ševčenko was founding director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing contemporary issues, and served as Vice President for Programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. She received her BA in history from Yale University and her MA in history from New York University. In 2017 she was awarded the Rome Prize to start her forthcoming book, Public Memory for the Post-Truth Era.