Speaker: Professor Victoria Sanford (Lehman Professor of Excellence and Professor of Anthropology, Lehman College, City University of New York)

Moderator: John Lee Candelaria (Hiroshima University)

Date and Time: Tuesday, 14 October 2025 / 10:00 – 11:30 AM (JST)

Mode: via Microsoft Teams

Language: English

This event is held with the cooperation of the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) and the Center for Peaceful and Sustainable Futures (CEPEAS).

About the Lecture:

Friends Who Disappear is about the practice of forced disappearance through the story of Dr. Marvyn Perez’s childhood abduction, disappearance and torture by Guatemalan security forces in 1982. Marvyn’s story of survival, flight to the US, struggle for political asylum and his relentless pursuit of justice is a blueprint for peacebuilding and carried out by survivors of human rights violations. It is also the story of local US press accounts connecting immigrant rights and migration to US Cold War policies, the US sanctuary movement and the lawyers and immigration activists supporting refugees and stopping intervention in Central America. Friends Who Disappear is an eye-opening window into a Guatemalan clandestine jail and the Kafkaesque U.S. asylum system. It is the chronicle of the author’s 30-year friendship with Marvyn, an inspirational story of remaking life and a call to peaceful action.

About the Speaker

Dr. Sanford is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellow and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California. She is a Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College, City University of New York, Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Founding Director of the Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies. She is a founding member of the Center for The Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the CUNY Graduate Center where she is also a member of the Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology. She has given expert testimony on the Guatemalan Genocide in international courts and is frequently featured in major media in the U.S. and abroad— including National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, the New York Times and El Pais. She has published op-eds in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven widely acclaimed books, including Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala and Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez & Her Father’s Quest for Justice. For more information, see https://www.victoriasanford.info/).

Link to Join: https://bit.ly/ipcs43