Everard Meade

Director, Trans Border Institute

• PhD, History, The University of Chicago
  
• MA, Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
  
• BA, History, The University of Chicago

Dr. Meade’s research explores the history and theory of human rights, with a geographic focus on Mexico and Central America and a thematic focus on the relationships between violence, memory, and the law. He has two forthcoming books on the history of the death penalty and its abolition in Mexico. The first explores the declining practice of the death penalty during a century of civil war and foreign invasion that made the firing squad an implacable symbol of Mexico at home and abroad. The second examines attempts to reinstate the death penalty after its elimination from the federal penal code in 1929, the spectacular murder cases that provoked them, and the changing meanings of impunity from the age of global war to the age of international human rights. He co-edited a collection of essays on the lessons and legacies of the war on Terror a decade after 9/11. Most recently, he edited and translated a collection of 31 first-hand accounts of the violence of the drug war in Sinaloa, by prize-winning local journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas. He’s currently working on a project documenting the experience of refugees from the hemispheric drug war, who’ve sought safe haven in the United States.

For the last fifteen years, Dr. Meade has been a volunteer at the National Immigrant Justice Center (Chicago, IL), which coordinates the largest network of pro bono immigration attorneys in the country, and he recently joined the advisory board of the American Bar Association’s Immigrant Justice Project (San Diego, CA). He has served as an expert witness in a number of asylum cases involving Mexican nationals fleeing the current wave of violence, including RRD v. Holder, a precedent-setting case from the U.S. Seventh-Circuit Court of Appeals. He is a frequent Op-Ed contributor on related issues, and he has been interviewed and cited in a variety of national media outlets.

Dr. Meade teaches courses on human rights, history, and peacebuilding. He leads a team of undergraduate interns working to verify and document the claims of individual asylum seekers fleeing violence in Mexico, and a team of graduate students from the Kroc School of Peace Studies who are developing a set of interactive peacebuilding seminars for community activists and the next generation of civic leaders in Sinaloa, Mexico. Before coming to USD, Dr. Meade was a professor in the History Department and co-founder of the Human Rights Minor Program at Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego.

Syllabi