On Leave
Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Conflict, Violence and Genocide
- Latin America and Caribbean
- Social
- State, Politics, and Law
Areas of Interest
Modern Latin America; Colombia; Human Rights; Social Movements; Inter-American Human Rights System; Political Violence; Authoritarianism.
Biography
Luis van Isschot is a historian of modern Latin America. His first book "The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010", was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2015 as part of their Critical Human Rights series. It was published in Spanish in Colombia by the Editorial Universidad del Rosario in 2020.
Professor van Isschot has been named a Faculty Research Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto for the 2025-2026 academic year. He will be working on a project entitled "Corporate Lives and Landscapes: The Construction, Development, and Representation of Foreign-Owned Enclaves on South America’s Oil Frontier".
He is currently completing a book on civil society organized popular tribunals, including the Bertrand Russell Tribunal and the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, and similar initiatives. This project received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He is also working on the social history of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
He is a member of the Observatoire Violences, criminalisation et démocratie en Amérique latine research team led by Marie-Christine Doran at the University of Ottawa, focused on the criminalization of protest in Latin America.
For more than two decades he has been professionally concerned with human rights, engaged in research and advocacy. He worked with Colombia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2019 to 2023, conducting interviews with exiles living in Canada and organizing outreach activities. He has also written legal opinions on issues of human rights violations and crimes against humanity in Colombia.
Professor van Isschot was Director of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto from 2022 to 2024. Prior to his appointment to the University of Toronto, he was Assistant Professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. Previously, he worked at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York.
Education
Publications
- "Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples: Colombian Contributions to the History of Popular Tribunals" (Routledge : 2024)
- Racial Frontiers: Hemispheric Logics of Haitians’ Displacement and Asylum in the Americas ( : 2023)
- Orígenes sociales de los derechos humanos: violencia y protesta en la capital petrolera de Colombia (Editorial Universidad del Rosario : 2020)
- Expert Report of Luis van Isschot (United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, in case of Plaintiffs v. Carlos Mario Jiménez Naranjo, Defendant : 2019)
- Rural Colombia: The Architecture of State-Sponsored Violence and New Power Configurations (Palgrave Macmillan : 2017)
- “Land, Memory and Justice: Challenges for Peace in Colombia”, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (Routledge : 2017)
- “Assessing the Record of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Latin America’s Rural Conflict Zones (1979-2016)”, The International Journal of Human Rights (Routledge : 2017)
- The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919–2010 (University of Wisconsin Press : 2015)
- The Heart of Activism in Colombia: Reflections on Activism and Oral History Research in a Conflict Area (Palgrave Macmillan : 2013)