Staff and Board

Mark Wallem has served as Executive Director since 2019. Prior to his time with ALBA, he worked in international development for 21 years, including posts in Nepal, Cambodia, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Thailand. His international projects include a groundbreaking Internet Freedom program, promoting and defending online freedom of expression in Southeast Asia. He has also directed programs for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and UN Women. Hailing from Minnesota, Wallem is a lawyer, with a history of political activism and rights advocacy in both the US and abroad.

Marina Mihajlova moved to NYC from Macedonia (Southeast Europe) in 2011, along with her family. She has been in the accounting and bookkeeping sector since she was young, and was brought up working with her family’s business in her home country. Coming to the US was a big challenge, and the accounting practices differ somewhat, but in the end, the numbers are still what matter. Like ALBA, she is dedicated to social activism and the defense of human rights. Marina is also a supporter of Greenpeace, environmental justice, and animal welfare.

Sebastiaan Faber was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he studied Spanish; his doctorate is from the University of California, Davis. He is Professor of the Department of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College, where he directs the Center of Languages and Cultures.  Sebastiaan is the author of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Exiles in Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2002) and Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War (Palgrave, 2008), as well as some sixty articles on Spanish and Latin American literature, history, and politics. You can find his faculty webpage here. In 2000 he won the George Watt Essay Prize in the graduate category and has been on the ALBA board since 2004. He is an editor of the online edition of The Volunteer.

Gina Herrmann is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Oregon and is on the editorial board of The Volunteer. She is the author of articles on Spanish political culture, particularly communist literature and history, and is an oral historian. Her first book, Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2009

Peter N. Carroll is the author and editor of 17 books, including The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, 1994), The Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade(2006), and Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (NYU, 2007). He is co-curator of two museum exhibitions: Shouts From the Wall: Posters of the Spanish Civil War (with Cary Nelson) and They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime From the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (with Anthony L. Geist). He is an editor of The Volunteer and he serves as a trustee of the Puffin Nation Prize for creative citizenship. He teaches history at Stanford University. He is also the author of a poetry volume, Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem (2008).

Anthony Geist is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Geist's research concerns the art and literature of the Spanish Civil War. He published a photo-essay on Seattle-area Lincoln Brigade veterans, coauthored with the Spanish photojournalist José Moreno, entitled Passing the Torch: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and its Legacy of Hope / Otra cara de América: Los brigadistas y su legado de esperanza. He has also curated ALBA’s traveling exhibit, They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo. The accompanying book was published in 2002. In 2006 he co-produced and co-directed a documentary film on the American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War, Souls without Borders: The Untold Story of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1936-2006.

Josephine Nelson Yurek is a founding member of the Bronx National Organization for Women and of the Cinnamon Tree Day Care Center. Member of the board of directors of Lehman College Performing Arts Center for ten years. Retired as a high school administrator from the New York City public school system. Daughter of a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Steve Nelson.

Daniel Czitrom is Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, where he has taught since 1981 with a focus on recent American cultural and political history. He joined the ALBA Board in 1987 and served as its Chair from 1990-94. His latest book is Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn of the Century New York (with Bonnie Yochelson, 2007). Czitrom is also the author ofMedia and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (1982), which received the First Books Award from the American Historical Association and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. He is also co-author of Out of Many: A History of the American People(Pearson Prentice Hall, 6th ed., 2008), a best selling U.S. History college textbook. In 2003 Czitrom’s historical drama, Red Bessie, (co-written with playwright Jack Gilhooley), was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It is based on the letters and experiences of two Lincoln Brigade vets, the brothers Joe and Leo Gordon

Chris Brooks is the driving force behind ALBA’s online biographical database of Lincoln Brigade veterans. His countless hours of research and correspondence have produced a comprehensive and accessible collection that has put a story and a face to thousands of veterans.

Kate Doyle is a senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive where she directs the Evidence Project, connecting the right to truth and access to information with human rights and justice struggles in Latin America. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with human rights organizations, truth commissions and prosecutors to obtain government records from secret archives that shed light on state violence. In 2012, Doyle was awarded the ALBA/ Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, which she shared with Fredy Peccerelli of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala.

Peter Glazer is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.  He is a professional director and playwright whose plays, adaptations, collaborations and directing projects include Woody Guthrie's American Song (Bay Area Drama Critics award winner at Berkeley Rep and San Jose Rep; Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations Off-Broadway at Melting Pot Theater Co.; Joseph Jefferson Award winner at Northlight Theater in Chicago), O'Carolan's Farewell to Music (Delaware Theater Co.), Michael, Margaret, Pat & Kate (Marin Theater Co., Victory Gardens Theater), Heart of Spain and Foe (Northwestern University), My Fair Lady (American Musical Theater of San Jose), Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Industrial Strength Co. at the Magic Theater).

Jack Mayerhofer joined ALBA’s Board in 2020. He has strong family ties with Spain and a deep interest in the Civil War period and the efforts of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Jack serves as the Deputy Executive Director at the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities (AIPG), an organization that provides training, education, and technical assistance, primarily to governments to improve their policies for the prevention of identity-based violence. At AIPG, Jack Mayerhofer leads the activities of the organization’s Executive Office in Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Southeast Asia. His research interests include the role that legislators can play in contributing to the prevention of mass atrocities. Both AIPG and ALBA work to ensure that memory and memorialization of the past are used to improve how we protect and promote human rights today. For the past and the present, it is essential that we remember that individuals from all around the world, with no support from their home governments, risked their lives to fight for democracy in a faraway place, not due to any threat to their personal livelihood, but simply because they understood the importance of fighting fascism.

Julia Newman worked in advertising as a producer of television commercials for many years and as a journalist whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, Miami Herald, Travel and Leisure, and Metropolitan Home.  Her award-winning documentary, Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War, was broadcast on Public Television and Spanish Television and is distributed in the U. S. by First Run Features. She was the Executive Director of ALBA for 5 1/2 years.

Cristina Pérez Jiménez (she/her/ella) is an assistant professor of English at Manhattan College, where she specializes in U.S. Latinx and Caribbean cultural studies with a focus on race and ethnicity, migration and diaspora studies, urban studies, especially NYC, and histories of the left and ethnic social movements. She is the co-editor of a bilingual scholarly edition of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Manhattan Tropics/Trópico en Manhattan (Arte Público, 2019) and her research has appeared in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Latino Studies, Post45, Small Axe, CENTRO Journal, among other venues. Dr. Pérez Jiménez is currently completing a book called Here to Stay: The Making of Latinx New York, which explores the emergence of a distinctive New York Latinx cultural identity during the sociopolitical conjuncture of the 1930s and 1940s, and developing a public humanities, digital project entitled “The Latino Catskills.”

Cynthia Young joined the ALBA board in 2020. Since 2000, she has worked at the International Center of Photography, specifically with the Robert Capa Archive. She has curated numerous exhibitions from the collection that have traveled throughout Spain and other countries in Europe and South America. Recent exhibitions include The Mexican Suitcase, the Rediscovered Negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim; We Went Back: Photographs from Europe by Chim, 1933-1956 and Capa in Color. She recently edited the republication of Death in the Making, Capa’s 1938 photobook of images from Spain.

Larry Cox is a former executive director of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA). A veteran human rights advocate, he also served 11 years as senior program officer for the Ford Foundation, Human Rights unit, where he focused on the promotion of international justice and the advancement of domestic human rights. In 1990, Cox became the executive director of the Rainforest Foundation, an international organization that works with indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon to protect their rights. During his time at the Rainforest Foundation, Cox dedicated much of his time to the issue of demarcation of indigenous territories in Brazil. Cox holds a B.A. in history from Mount Union College and has completed graduate work at the University of Geneva. Since November 2013, he has served as Co-Director of Kairos: The Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary (New York City).

Adam Hochschild is the author of ten books, including "Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939," which appeared in 2016. "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard Press, 2012); Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, 1994); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). He also edited (with Franklin Rosemont) Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2009), recipient of an American Book Award, and (with Stephen Tuck) The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2015). Kelley's essays have appeared in several anthologies and publications, including The Nation, Monthly Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, New York Times (Arts and Leisure), Counterpunch, Black Music Research Journal, Callaloo, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text, Boston Review, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Souls, to name a few.

Antonio Muñoz Molina is a Spanish writer and, since 1995, a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He studied art history at the University of Granada and journalism in Madrid. He began writing in the 1980s and his first published book, El Robinsón urbano, a collection of his journalistic work, was published in 1984. His columns have regularly appeared in El País and Die Welt.

John Sayles is the writer and director of acclaimed independent films including Return of the Secaucus 7, Matewan, Lianna, Baby It’s You, The Brother From Another Planet, Eight Men Out, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men with Guns, Limbo, Sunshine State, Casa de los Babys, Silver City and Honeydripper. Sayles has also written novels and short stories. Among his awards: John D. MacArthur Award, Eugene V. Debs Award, John Steinbeck Award, John Cassavettes Award, Ian McLellan Hunter Award. He has been nominated twice for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. Mr. Stevenson is the author of the acclaimed best-seller, Just Mercy, on which the 2019 feature film of the same name is based. He is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. In 2014, Mr Stevenson was the recipient of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism.