Blog posted under Literature

Read reflections from students who turned responses and iterative feedback from the 21 incarcerated scholars, artists, and advocates into the chapbook: Humans of Life Row: “I walk into the future by visualizing it today”.

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING Timothy Garton Ash’s book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World — it is “the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” You might catch the ironic echo of the opening line from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, but this quote is taken from “The Power of the Powerless,” the most important essay by Václav Havel, the playwright and dissident who was elected president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Published last May, Free Speech is a book about all that has changed for global freedom of expression since the seemingly triumphant year of ’89. But what if the post-1989 world that Garton Ash is addressing has already vanished?

Genealogies of human rights and human rights studies have a vexed relationship with the Victorian era and the nineteenth-century more generally.

James Dawes, author of "Evil Men" (2013) and "That The World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity" (2007), has published a lead article from a new project, on "The Novel of Human Rights," in the Spring 2016 volume of the journal American Literature.