Yasmine Ergas

Yasmine Ergas is the Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, where she directs the program on Gender and the Human Rights of Women and teaches at the School of International and Public Affairs. She is currently engaged in a study of the transnationalization of everyday life and recently completed an essay on “Babies without Borders” that discusses market in international surrogacy.

Ergas has served as a consultant to major international organizations, including the OECD and UNESCO. She initiated the work of the Social Science Research Council on the social consequences of HIV/AIDS and led its program on Western Europe and CENSIS. She is a former member of the School of Social Science of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Italian National Council of Research and the Pembroke Center at Brown University and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University as well as at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women. Her work has been published extensively, including internationally from Germany to Japan and India, as well as in the U.S. and Italy. Her articles have appeared in The New Republic and in il foglio, among others, and she has made numerous guest appearances on television news and commentary programs, from Thomson Reuters TV to Italy’s la sette. Ergas grew up in Europe and was educated in Switzerland, Italy and the U.K. before earning her J.D. at Columbia Law School.