Dear Colleagues,
As the Pozen Center enters its 26th year at the University of Chicago, we want to take this opportunity to reflect on the events and accomplishments of the past year and share with you some of our plans as we move into the new academic year.
We marked our 25th anniversary year in 2022-23 with a series of University-wide events that ushered in an exciting new phase in the Center’s growth.
A new College major in human rights was launched that offers an innovative interdisciplinary program and integrates the center’s established human rights curriculum with immersive experiential learning. As we continue to deepen and thicken the Center’s commitment to experiential education, this year we welcome Pedro Gerson (MPP’14, JD’14) who will be directing the Center’s human rights practice space, developing new practice and experiential learning opportunities.
The Center also continues to invest in the next generation of scholars through its Doctoral Fellows program, graduate research awards, and graduate lectureships.
This past year, the Center hosted seven exceptional doctoral fellows drawn from departments across the Humanities and Social Science Divisions in a program designed to foster interdisciplinary research. Their innovative projects—ranging from the effects of wrongful conviction and exoneration in the US to Marxist humanist critiques of colonialism in the Third World through the concept of alienation—are mapping the future landscape of human rights research.
Nine new PhD students will join us this coming year, and we are working to build a collaborative relationship with faculty and graduate students at the London School of Economics to further enrich the experiences offered in the Doctoral Fellows program.
Throughout this last year, Alice Kim has continued the amazing work of the Center’s Human Rights Laboratory. Alice and her team have brought together students and the wider Chicago community to build a truly innovative, diverse, and impactful set of initiatives and programs around the crisis of mass incarceration and criminalization. We are delighted that Alice will be able to continue to advance the work of this project beyond its initial five years of Pozen funding at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture with the support of the Provost’s Office.
We are very proud of the work that the Pozen Center has done over the last 25 years, and we are committed to ensuring that the Center continues to be a global and community leader in human rights research, pedagogy, and experiential engagement.
Mark Philip Bradley, Faculty Director
Kathleen Cavanaugh, Executive Director