Academic Year 2006-2007
Spring 2007
Jerry Fowler is the founding staff director of the Committee on Conscience, which guides the genocide prevention efforts of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Darfur has been a particular focus of his international work in genocide issues, and has since stimulated national and international debates about ongoing violence in the region. At the Holocaust Memorial Museum, he organized meetings that resulted in the creation of the first chapter of STAND, an umbrella organization of more than 600 high school and college chapters dedicated to putting an end to genocide, specifically the ongoing genocide in Darfur.
In July 2004, Fowler and Ruth Messinger of American Jewish World Service organized the Darfur Emergency Summit, a meeting that was the genesis of the Save Darfur Coalition: an alliance of more than 170 faith-based, advocacy, and humanitarian organizations. The coalitions have been instrumental in raising international awareness of violence in Darfur and elsewhere. His publications include the essay, “Out of that Darkness: Preventing Genocide in the 21st Century,” in the second edition of Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (Routledge, 2004). He also directed the short film, A Good Man in Hell: General Romeo Dallaire and the Rwanda Genocide (2003). His two talks at the Athenaeum were titled “Torch in the Night, Candle in the Dark: Promoting Human Rights Since the Holocaust” and “Darfur: So Far from Here.”