Visiting Professor
Professor Rebecca Hamilton is a Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law. She is an internationally recognized expert on atrocity prevention, and her scholarship focuses on the structural factors underlying human rights violations and international crimes. She has a particular interest in the role of social media and digital evidence in conflict-affected communities. Her work draws on her experience in the prosecution of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as her work in conflict zones as a foreign correspondent. She is an Executive Editor of the national security law publication, Just Security.
Professor Hamilton has been awarded a 2024 U.S. Fulbright Scholar Award to conduct research into the human rights impacts of new information technologies in climate-affected small island states. She is a 2023 Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Hamilton’s recent scholarship has appeared in the Yale Journal of International Law, University of Georgia Law Review, Harvard International Law Journal, and Boston College Law Review. She is the author of Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, which analyzes citizen activism and the effort to stop mass atrocities. As a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, she served in the Office of Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict in the Department of Defense.
Professor Hamilton has received a number of grants, awards, fellowships, including the WCL Award for Innovation in Pedagogy (2021), the Pauline Ruyle Moore Scholars Award (2018, 2020), and the CFR International Affairs Fellowship (2020). She has also been a Pulitzer Center grantee, and the recipient of fellowships from New America and the Open Society Foundations.
Previously, Professor Hamilton served as a lawyer in the prosecutorial division of the International Criminal Court, working on cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda and Sudan. Hamilton has also worked in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and has been the Deputy Director of the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law. Prior to entering academia she worked as a journalist for the Washington Post, and Reuters. Her writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. Recent interviews include CNN, PBS Newshour, NPR, BBC and Al-Jazeera.
Professor Hamilton is a member of the New York Bar, the American Society of International Law, and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. As a proud first generation high school and college graduate, she serves as a mentor to firstgen students. With the financial support of a Knox Fellowship, she received her J.D from Harvard Law School and M.P.P from Harvard Kennedy School. A graduate of the University of Sydney, she was born in Aotearoa, NZ.