Rate My Professor Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University, serving as Director of the Centre for Human Rights Education since 2025. He is also a Senior Lecturer (Human Rights) in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. Woldeyes holds an MA and a PhD from Curtin University, where he has worked as a researcher and lecturer for the past 11 years. Originally from Ethiopia, he taught law and worked with community-based organizations there prior to relocating to Australia. As a multidisciplinary researcher, his academic interests encompass the critical study of human rights, development, education, and law, with emphasis on lived experiences, epistemic diversity, decolonial futures, indigenous knowledges, African epistemologies, cultural heritage, colonial violence, and Ethiopian traditions.

Woldeyes has authored influential works including Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence Against Traditions in Ethiopia (2017), Cognitive Slavery and Decolonial Pedagogy for Human Rights Education in Africa (2021), Voices from the Darker Side of Development (2021, co-authored), and Critical Appreciative Dialogue: Pedagogy for Critical Human Rights Education (2017). His peer-reviewed publications feature Decolonizing human rights education: Critical pedagogy praxis in higher education (2018), Holding Living Bodies in Graveyards: The Violence of Keeping Ethiopian Manuscripts in Western Institutions (2020), Decolonising the environment through African epistemologies (2021), and Human rights and the nation state in the Global South: A genealogical and decolonial critique (2025), accumulating over 250 citations on Google Scholar. He has earned the 2019 Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award and the 2024 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award for his bilingual memoir Trials of Hope (የተስፋ ፈተና). Woldeyes coordinates and teaches in the Master of Human Rights Education program, supervises PhD students, delivers public lectures and keynotes, and contributes as an award-winning poet and writer.