People

Staff

Joe Eggers

Interim Director

Joe Eggers joined the center in 2015 as a graduate assistant and staff member in 2018. In addition to his role as Interim Director, Joe coordinates the outreach efforts for the center, including developing connections with local communities and educators. He's especially interested in exploring the legacies of settler colonialism and how they are taught in classrooms.

George Dalbo

Research Fellow

George Dalbo is a Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota and an Assistant Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College. Before entering higher education, he taught middle and high school social studies in Minnesota and Wisconsin. He earned a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction (Social Studies Education) with a minor in Human Rights from the University of Minnesota. His research, informed by his experiences as a classroom teacher, focuses broadly on genocide education in K–12 schools. In particular, he examines the possibilities and limitations of genocide education as both a form of and a pathway toward reparative justice in settler-colonial nation-states such as the United States and Canada. His first book, Unsettling Narratives: Teaching About Genocide in a Settler Space (Ethics Press, 2025), explores a semester-long high school genocide studies course in rural Wisconsin and the challenges of teaching about genocide within a settler-colonial context.

Walter Francis

Research Assistant and PhD Candidate (History)

Walter Francis is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. He previously received an M.A. in Jewish Studies from Columbia University. His research focuses generally on the Jewish communities of North Africa in the twentieth century, and his dissertation examines the experiences of the Tunisian Jews during the six-month Nazi Occupation and its effects on their definition of their communal and personal identities in the era of post-war decolonization. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the American Joint Distribution Committee.

Kendra Lee

Project Coordinator

Kendra Lee graduated from St. Cloud State University with a B.Sc. in Mass Communications and a minor in Political Science. She has previously worked in communications with St. Cloud State’s Center for Holocaust & Genocide Education and with The Advocates for Human Rights. She’s interested in human rights, war crimes, and reparations processes, with a particular interest in women's and children’s rights and the Korean Peninsula.

Tibisay Navarro-Mana

Research Assistant, and PhD Candidate (History)

Tibisay Navarro-Mana is a PhD candidate in the History Department. Originally from Barcelona, Spain, her research focuses on the politics of historical memory during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist regime in Spain, particularly around the Francoist boarding schools and the competing archives of memory around them. She has been working at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies for the past four years, where she has focused on projects related to education, including teachers' workshops and the development of lesson plans about genocide with a particular focus on Inquiry Design Models.
 

Carlo Tognato

Research Fellow

Carlo Tognato is currently Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota and Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He has been Senior Policy Fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University as well as Director of the Center for Social Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Colombia, Bogota. His research focuses on civil reconstruction, civil degradation, civil courage, and civil intervention. His latest publications include The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration (with B. N. Jaworsky and J. C. Alexander, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020), Sociedad, cultura y la esfera civil (with Nelson Arteaga-Botello, FLACSO-Mexico, 2019), The Civil Sphere in Latin America (with J. C. Alexander, Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus (The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2017).

Michael Winikoff

Education Fellow

Michael Winikoff is a visual artist, writer, and educator who uses arts-based approaches to help students and teachers explore themes of historical remembrance, human rights, and democracy. From 2015 to 2023, he directed the Science Communication Lab, an interdisciplinary internship program for student writers, scientists, artists, and designers. He is a member of the University's Human Rights Lab and a Fellow at the Institute on the Environment (IonE).
As the principal of Hollander Snow Studio, a public interest communication and design firm, Michael supports organizations like the Treatment Action Group, the Arts for Justice Initiative, and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.