Micheline Ishay is Professor of International Studies and Human Rights and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and University of Denver. She was awarded the 2022 Human Rights in Education Award.
Ishay received a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Studies from Rutgers University. She was a fellow at the Center for Critical Culture and Contemporary Analysis, Rutgers University; Assistant Professor at Hobart and William Smith College; Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland (2004); Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University (2006); and Visiting Professor, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (2010-2013). She was Resident Fellow at the Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation, Italy, Fall 2015. She was Visiting Fellow at the Institute of (IWM), Vienna, Fall 2021; Visiting Professor at the University of Tel Aviv (Spring 2022); Visiting Professor and Fellow at the Wissenschaft Zentrum Berlin (WZB) (Spring 2023); and Visiting Professor and Fellow at Le centre de recherches internationales (CERI), Sciences Po, Paris (Summer 2023). Often interviewed in the international press, Ishay frequently contributes to international forums in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and lectures on international issues in the U.S.
Her books, The History of Human Rights and The Human Rights Reader have been translated into multiple languages and are widely adopted in human rights courses throughout the world. The Third Edition of the Human Rights Reader that was published in 2022. The Philadelphia Inquirer ranked her History of Human Rights among the top ten non-fiction books of 2004. Her book, The Levant Express in 2019 by Yale University Press. Earlier books included the topics of internationalism and Arab uprisings, human rights, and the future of the Middle East. She is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters in theory, human rights, foreign policy and the Middle East.
Under her direction, Korbel's International Human Rights Program became one the most recognized human rights programs in the country. In 2019, she was recruited as a Vice-Director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue, an NGO under the auspices of the UN in Geneva. She is currently writing on Reconstructing Internationalism: Nationalist Challenges and New Human Rights.