The University of Arkansas Bookstore’s general book department is pleased to announce their featured book display for summer 2013. Books written by Samuel Totten will be displayed and available for review and purchase May through August 2013. Featured books include Genocide in Darfur: Investigating the Atrocities in the Sudan, We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights), and Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan.

Totten joined the faculty of the College of Education and Health Professions in 1987. During his career, he moved from a focus on Holocaust and genocide education to research into the prevention and intervention of genocide to the repeated genocides and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the regime of Sudanese President Omar al Bashir.

Between 1988 and 1992, Totten served on a small, elite team of educational consultants for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the predecessor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and continued his work as an educational consultant after the museum was established. He co-developed Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust distributed to over a half million educators and educational organizations across the globe.

In July 2004, Totten was selected to be a member of the U.S. Atrocities Documentation Team that was sent to refugee camps along the Chad/Sudan border to collect evidence that was eventually used by then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to determine whether the actions of the Sudanese government rose to the level of genocide. He has continued to document the voices of victims in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains (Sudan) to illustrate the human impact of genocidal actions both past and present. Many of his books that include critical analyses, interviews and primary source documents are in use in genocide courses in this country and abroad to help deepen students’ understanding of the complexity of the issue and the many and varied consequences for individuals of the targeted groups.

In 2008-2009, Totten served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda, conducting research into the plight and fate of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that resulted in a book, We Cannot Forget: Interviews with the Survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, which was published by Rutgers University Press in 2011.

During the 2009-2010 academic year, Totten served as the Ida King Distinguished Visiting Professor Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. While there, he continued his research in Chad along the Chad/Darfur, Sudan border.

Totten has had research articles published in a variety of peer-reviewed research journals, including Theory and Research in the Social Studies, Human Rights Review, Journal of Genocide Research, and Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. He has been invited to speak about his research and field work in genocide studies at a wide range of institutions in the United States and internationally, including Syracuse University, University of Chicago, University of Colorado at Boulder, U.S. Air Force Academy, University of Minnesota, University of Utah, Utah State University, University of Arkansas Law School, University of Michigan, Dearborn, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, University of Kentucky, The University of Amsterdam, the University of Copenhagen, the National University of Rwanda, Latrobe University (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), Latrobe University (Bendigo, Victoria, Australia), and the University of Sarajevo.

Totten has authored two books, co-authored three books, edited 11 books and co-edited 22 books. He served as the book review editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and co-founding editor of Genocide Studies and Prevention (the official journal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars).

In 2011 Totten was honored recently with a Distinguished Alumni Award from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Totten recently returned from the war torn Nuba Mountains where he helped to deliver five tons of food to people who were bombed out of their villages and off their farms by the Sudanese government. While in the Nuba Mountains (December 2012-January 2013), Antonov bombers flew some 55 missions which resulted in horrific injuries and many deaths.

Currently, Totten is teaching a course, Genocide: Cases and the Prevention and Intervention of Genocide, during the Intersession for the department of political science at the University of Arkansas. As far as it has been able to ascertain, it is the first course to be taught at the University of Arkansas on genocides other than the Holocaust (i.e., The History of the Holocaust by professor Evan Bukey, and The Literature of the Holocaust by professor Mark Corey). Among the cases the students are learning about are the genocide of the Mayans in Guatemala in the 1980s, the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda, the case of genocide by attrition in the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s, and the Darfur genocide, to be taught in the history of the University of Arkansas.