Felisa Tibbitts is Chair in Human Rights Education in the Department of Law, Economics and Governance at Utrecht University and UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Higher Education. Her research interests include human rights, (global) democratic citizenship education and education for sustainable development; curriculum policy and reform; critical pedagogy; education and social movements; and human rights and higher education transformation. She was a Fulbright Fellow at Lund University, Sweden (Fall 2014) and a Human Rights Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2011-2013). She was a full-time Lecturer at Teachers College of Columbia University between 2016 and 2022 and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University (2022-2023).

Felisa has published practical resources on curriculum, program development and evaluation on behalf of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, UNESCO, OSCE/ODIHR, the Council of Europe and non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International and the Open Society Foundations. Dr. Tibbitts is widely read in the field of human rights education and her scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals including Comparative Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Social Science Education, Intercultural Education, Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education and the International Review of Education.

Previously she was an adjunct faculty member at the Harvard School of Education and the UN-Mandated University for Peace and she remains affiliated with the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. She co-founded the NGO Human Rights Education Associates (HREA – www.hrea.org) in 1996, which she continues to direct. Felisa received her bachelor degree and two masters (Public Policy, Education) from Harvard University and her D.Phil in Political Science from the Otto-von-Guericke Universität of Magdeburg.

Awards and Grants

UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Higher Education (2019-present).

2018 CIES Innovation Award. Grant issued by Comparative International Education Society.

2016 Ed O’Brien Award for Human Rights Education, issued by Human Rights Educators USA.

Fulbright Specialist in higher education, with a focus on citizenship and human rights education. Based at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund, Sweden, fall 2014.

Human Rights Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2009-11)

Certificate of Merit Award, Conference of Eastern Educators Research Association (1991) for the paper “The Courtship and Consequences of Liberalization: A Snapshot of Educational Restructuring in Central East Europe”.

Harvard Institute for International Development research grant recipient (1990). This grant subsidized field work in five countries in Central and Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Pforzheimer Fellow (1989-90). Merit scholarships awarded to incoming doctoral students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.