About Victoria

A public scholar, anthropologist, and internationally recognized expert on the Guatemalan genocide and feminicide in contemporary Guatemala, Victoria Sanford is a writer, human rights advocate and Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez & Her Father’s Quest for Justice and Buried Secrets: Truth & Human Rights in Guatemala. She served as an invited expert witness in the Spanish National Court’s genocide case against the Guatemalan generals and in an indigenous land rights case in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Bunting Peace Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has also held fellowships at the US Institute for Peace, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Fulbright Scholar awards at the Universidad Libre and Javeriana University in Bogota, among others.