Barbara Adams is a retired associate professor, formerly in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College, a program she helped co-found in the 1970s. Her degrees: a B.A. in English literature from the University of Southern California and an M.A. from Yale University. As a teacher, Barbara specialized in feature journalism, arts criticism, and food and travel writing; she also developed an extensive internship program to provide professional experience for IC writing students. As a writer, for nearly five decades Barbara has been a theater critic, book reviewer, and arts journalist for Ithaca area publications. Her passions include theater and art, languages, gardening, and photography. She’s a founding member of Ithaca City of Asylum and former advisory board chair; she is also currently board president of The Ithaca Voice. 

Jason Freitag (chair) is Associate Professor of History at Ithaca College, with an academic specialty in South Asian and Islamic History. He is the author of Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan (Leiden: Brill, 2009).  He was awarded a Presidential Fellowship to study Global Engagement at Ithaca College (2018-19), and served as the co-chair of the Ithaca College Strategic Planning Committee (2018-19), as well as the co-chair of the Ithaca College Presidential Transition Team (2017-18).  In Fall 2025 he will begin a three-year appointment as Robert Ryan Professor in the Humanities at Ithaca College.

Mariette Geldenhuys has practiced law in Ithaca for more than 30 years, in areas including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender family law, estate planning, and adoption. Her practice focuses on collaborative law and mediation, to help clients resolve legal issues in a respectful, client-centered way and without litigation. She was one of four attorneys who represented the “Ithaca 50” pro bono in the action seeking marriage equality for same-sex couples in New York. Mariette is a member of the National Family Law Advisory Council of the National Center for Lesbian Rights; the New York State Bar Association Committee on LGBT People and the Law; the Finger Lakes Women’s Bar Association; and the National LGBT Bar Association. She is also the founder and founding president of the Ithaca Area Collaborative Law Professionals. 

Kathleen Gemmell retired from Cornell in 2020 after a long career in higher education administration. Her responsibilities included research and data analysis, program planning, policy development, and management of an external academic review process. She has a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from American University and a PG diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of A Common Bond (Allegheny Press) and of poems in several literary magazines and journals. She first joined the ICOA advisory board in 2001 and has twice served as chair. She has volunteered with the Red Cross Disaster Response Team, including service in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. She has a love of literature, film, and travel and has hiked in some of the most beautiful parts of the world.

David Guaspari (treasurer) has a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from Cambridge University. He has taught in the math departments of Cambridge, SUNY Buffalo, Texas Tech, and Cornell. At St. John’s College he also taught music, literature, and philosophy. In addition to technical papers on mathematics and computer science, he has published short fiction, essays, and reviews in a wide variety of literary and political journals, and his short plays have been performed in theaters throughout the US and in five foreign countries. He first joined the advisory board of ICOA in 2004.

Mary Jacobus (secretary) moved from Oxford University to Cornell in 1980, where she was Professor of English and Women¹s Studies. From 2000 to 2011 she was Grace 2 Professor of English at Cambridge University and from 2006 to 2011 Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). In 2011-12, she returned to Cornell as M. H. Abrams Visiting Professor. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and Churchill College, Cambridge. She served on the Academic Committee of Norway’s Holberg International Memorial Prize (2009-2015; chair 2012-15). She has written on Romanticism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, and most recently on art, migration, and (forthcoming) forests. During her time as Director of CRASSH she created a scholar-at-risk fellowship and worked to identify a recipient in collaboration with the UK organization, CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics).

Athena Kirk is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Cornell University, where she specializes in Ancient Greek language, literature, and culture. She is the author of many scholarly articles and the book Ancient Greek Lists: Catalogue and Inventory Across Genres.  She has worked extensively in Cornell’s Active Learning Initiative for engaged student learning, serving as program liaison, organizing faculty participation, and developing the featured new course Hieroglyphs to HTML. She has organized several public humanities and outreach events at Cornell, including “Odyssey in Ithaca,” a 12-hour community reading of Homer’s Odyssey, and she has been featured as a guest speaker for public radio and television programs, local arts organizations, and podcasts. 

Ian Matthew Kysel (on leave 2025-26) is a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where he co-directs the Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic and is a founder and directs the International Migrants Bill of Rights (IMBR) Initiative. He has published academic work in a number of U.S. law review journals as well as peer-reviewed journals and has written several human rights reports; his opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He previously held appointments at the University of Oxford and at the Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued or participated in litigation before U.S. immigration, federal, and state courts as well as international tribunals. He currently also serves as a Trustee of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), sits on the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch’s Children’s Rights Division, and is a co-organizer of the ACLU’s national Youth Justice Network.

Jonathan Miller (vice-chair) is a freelance print and radio journalist and co-director of Story House Ithaca, an organization that brings people together to share, enjoy, and create stories of all kinds. He is also executive director of Homelands Productions, a nonprofit journalism collective specializing in public radio features and documentaries. From 2016 to 2018 he served as associate director of Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. As a journalist he has worked in more than 20 countries in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. His work has been broadcast on NPR, Marketplace, PRI’s The World, BBC, CBC, PBS NewsHour, and other radio and television outlets, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. He has won several awards for his writing and radio projects. He has a degree in English Literature from Swarthmore College.

Pedro X. Molina is an internationally acclaimed political cartoonist who fled his native Nicaragua during a crackdown on journalists and government critics in 2018. He was ICOA’s resident artist from 2019 to 2021, serving as an International Writer in Residence at Ithaca College and an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence with Cornell University’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Pedro contributes daily cartoons for Confidencial and is a regular contributor to Counterpoint.com. He has also been published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. Among his many honors is a 2023 Vaclav Havel Award for Creative Dissent, a 2021 Gabo Prize for Excellence, and a 2019 Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia Journalism School for “career excellence and coverage of the Western Hemisphere that furthers inter-American understanding.”

Heather E. Murray is the Associate Director of the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic and the Managing Attorney of its Local Journalism Project. In addition to co-teaching the Clinic’s seminar, she supervises Clinic attorneys, students and summer fellows in litigating free speech and free press matters and manages all aspects of the Cornell Local Journalism Project. She previously was a litigation associate at two international law firms and during her time there received a 2018 Law360 Distinguished Legal Writing Award from the Burton Foundation. Prior to her legal career, she worked as a journalist at local newspapers in New York. She is a member of the advisory committee of ProJourn, a pro bono initiative for journalists that is housed at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She also serves as chair of the board of directors of Queens-based child welfare agency Forestdale, Inc.

Catherine Porter (on leave 2025-26), 2009 President of the Modern Language Association, received her doctorate in French literature from Yale University in 1972. She is Visiting Professor at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, and Professor of French Emerita at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. A freelance translator in the humanities and the social sciences, she has published a number of essays and some four dozen books in translation from the French, including most recently Elisabeth Roudinesco, Freud in His Time and Ours, and Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia and Down to Earth; forthcoming titles include Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichment, and Claire Zalc, Denaturalized. She served previously on the ICOA advisory board from 2001 to 2007.

Raza Rumi (on leave 2025-26) was Ithaca City of Asylum’s writer in residence from 2015 to 2017. In 2018, he became director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College. He is a television host, journalist, policy consultant, and a leading voice for human rights and against extremism in his native Pakistan. He survived an assassination attempt in March 2014 by political Islamists in which his driver lost his life. He continues to produce essays and editorials for the Pakistani and international press. He also co-edits the online publication Ideas & Futures.

Susan Tarrow received her MA in French and German from Oxford University, and her PhD in French and Italian from Cornell University, after stints at UC Berkeley and Yale. She has taught courses in advanced composition, on Camus and contemporary French fiction, on French and Francophone cultures, and Francophone literature of the Maghreb. She has published on Camus, on Maghrebian and “beur” literature, and on Primo Levi. From 1985-2005, she was associate director of Cornell’s Institute for European Studies. In her retirement, she works on translation from French, writes articles for a local newsletter, and travels widely. In addition to her work for ICOA, she organizes volunteer translators and interpreters working for Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, a non-profit group coordinating resettlement of refugees under the umbrella of Catholic Charities.