Welcome to the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law's Spring 2019 Visitors
The Center for Gender & Sexuality Law welcomes Svati Shah, Daniel Del Gobbo, and Simone George as Visiting Faculty in Residence and Visiting Scholars for the Spring of 2019 at Columbia Law School
Welcome to the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law's Spring 2019 Visitors
January 28, 2019
The Center for Gender & Sexuality Law is pleased to welcome Svati P. Shah as a Visiting Faculty Member in Residence this Spring, as well as two Visiting Scholars, Simone George, and Daniel Del Gobbo, for the Spring 2019 Semester at Columbia Law School.
This Spring, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law will offer programs and events featuring our visitors. We will work, too, to connect these scholars with our colleagues and cohorts in other departments at the University.
Learn more about our Spring 2019 Visiting Scholars below.
Svati P. Shah
Associate Professor, UMass Amherst
Visiting Faculty in Residence
Jerome Greene Hall, Office 626
Svati P. Shah is an anthropologist of South Asia whose work interrogates questions of sexuality, space, political economy, migration, and caste,
while also engaging critiques of temporality, autonomy and, more recently, object-oriented ontology. Her first book, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai (Duke University Press 2014) was drawn from a long term ethnography of sex work and ‘sexual commerce’ in Mumbai’s informal economies, including spaces where lower caste migrants solicited day wage labor opportunities while struggling to survive in semi-permanent housing settlements on the edge of the city. Her second book, Queering the Indian Emergency, is drawn from a five year, multi-sited ethnographic and archival research project on the ‘near history’ of LGBTQI politics in India. It traces contemporary discourses of these movements back to the post-Emergency era of civil liberties and democratic rights movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where the ‘emergency’ references the imposition of martial law in India in the mid-1970s. Both of these books, as well as her new work on struggles over rural infrastructural development and migration in western India, examine the philosophical underpinnings of the status of knowledge in relation to the rise of populist imaginaries of governance, and the erosion of institutional protections against the consolidation of juridical power.
Simone George
Visiting Scholar
Website: https://simonegeorge.com
Simone George is a human rights lawyer and activist, a consultant commercial litigator, a paralysis cure hunter and a TED2018 Speaker.
As a human rights lawyer, Simone represents women who are experiencing abuse and is presently researching why those in our systems don’t adequately serve justice. She co-authored the report “The Lawlessness of the Home” with an Irish NGO, finding that we are all responsible for women and children’s right to bodily integrity and to liberty. She also co-created a summit in 2016 to cultivate the leadership required to arm us for this responsibility, gathering the world’s foremost thinkers and activists together in Dublin. This work led to significant amendments to legislation and will contribute to a new landscape of social and political justice in Ireland.
In 2010, Simone’s fiancé — blind adventure athlete Mark Pollock — broke his back, and together the two learned how paralysis strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human. George’s research, which began by Pollock’s hospital bed, became the start of their next adventure — to find and connect people around the world to fast-track a cure for paralysis. George has been a catalyst for a global collaboration between groundbreaking scientists creating a paralysis cure and is the subject of feature documentary: Unbreakable. She is a director on the board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, a masters graduate from The College of Europe, Bruges, holds a diploma from Harvard and is a double-graduate of NUI Galway.
Simone is a double law graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway and a Masters graduate of The Collège d’Europe in Bruges holds a diploma in Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a Director of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, sits on the advisory board of Herstory Ireland and is a co-founder and thought partner for the Mark Pollock Trust.
Daniel Del Gobbo
Adjunct Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
SJD Candidate, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
Visiting Scholar
Daniel Del Gobbo is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, CBA Viscount Bennett Fellow, SSHRC Doctoral Fellow, and SJD Candidate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. His current research interests fall at the intersections of ADR and civil procedure, feminist and queer legal theory, access to justice, and equality law, with his doctoral work focusing on the use of consensual dispute resolution in addressing the problem of campus sexual violence in Canada and the United States. Previously, Daniel earned an LLM from Harvard Law School and JD from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
Daniel is currently an Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he teaches “Dispute Settlement,” an advanced, upper-year seminar in ADR and dispute systems design, and leads a team of over 30 instructors as the Course Director of “Lawyer as Negotiator,” an experiential learning course in representative negotiation. He has received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award for Adjunct Faculty in recognition of his contributions to the Osgoode community.
Daniel‘s academic and advocacy work are committed to the public interest. He has advised organizations including the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and International Committee of the Red Cross on projects related to restorative justice, sexual violence, humanitarian negotiation, women’s rights, and LGBTQ2 equality in Canada. Before entering academia, Daniel maintained a busy litigation practice in both the private and public sectors, working for two multinational law firms as well as one of the largest social housing providers in North America.