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The virtual human rights library brings together resources from multiple libraries and information services, both internal and external, to create an online hub dedicated to the study of human rights. This curation is unique in its interdisciplinary concerns and focuses on writings and research from social sciences, humanities, and law.

The virtual library is continually updated with the latest academic research in issue areas, as well as with relevant films, recorded conversations, and other forms of media.

Searchable Database

Click into the dropdowns to select the disciplines, keywords, and media type for your search, and then hit "Apply."

Philip Nord After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it...

W.G. Sebald Austerlitz (Modern Library, 2011)

 Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real...

Martha Minow Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Beacon Press, 1998)

With Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Martha Minow, Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on justice and healing after horrific violence. Remembering and forgetting, judging and forgiving, reconciling and avenging...

James N. Yamazaki Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands (Duke University Press, 1995)

Despite familiar images of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan and the controversy over its fiftieth anniversary, the human impact of those horrific events often seems lost to view. In this uncommon memoir, Dr. James N. Yamazaki tells...

Bhaskar Sarkar, Janet Walker Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (New York: Routledge, 2009)

Documentary Testimonies examines documentary films that compel us to bear witness, move us to anger or tears, and possibly mobilize us to action.

Comprising ten new essays and a substantive introduction, this interdisciplinary volume examines audiovisual testimonial practices, forms, and...

Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved (Simon and Schuster, 2017)

The Drowned and the Saved is a book of essays by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi on life and death in the Nazi extermination camps, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Auschwitz. The author's last...

James L. Hevia English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2003)

Inserting China into the history of nineteenth-century colonialism, English Lessons explores the ways that Euroamerican imperial powers humiliated the Qing monarchy and disciplined the Qing polity in the wake of multipower invasions of China in 1860 and 1900. Focusing on...

Allan Young The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton University Press, 2001)

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been...

Michael Rothberg, Yasemin Yildiz "Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany" Parallax, 17:4 (2011)

By taking migrants seriously as subjects of national and transnational memory, this essay picks up where Haacke’s project leaves off. It re-envisions the ‘population’ parallax as an active bearer of memory, rather than as merely a passive object of commemoration...

Michael Rothberg Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009)

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of...

Please Note:

While the Virtual Library is now live for use, we are still working to update its contents and improve its functionality.  

It is usable by all visitors, but the hyperlinks to materials listed are for UChicago community members with a CNet ID and password.  

Please direct feedback and suggestions to Kathleen Cavanaugh

For technical assistance, email pozenhumanrights @ uchicago.edu.

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