Dear Colleagues,
As the Pozen Center continues in its 28th 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 in this new academic year.
Our College major in human rights continues to grow and thrive—an innovative, interdisciplinary program that integrates the Pozen Center’s established human rights curriculum with immersive experiential learning. A total of 53 students declared human rights as their major. The Pozen Center had a cohort of 21 human rights graduates in spring 2025.
The Pozen Center also continues to invest in the next generation of scholars through its Doctoral Fellows Program, graduate research awards, and graduate lectureships. In the 2024-2025 academic year, the Pozen Center hosted eight exceptional doctoral fellows—drawn from departments across the Humanities and Social Science Divisions—in a program designed to foster interdisciplinary research. Their innovative projects range from a study of the repertoire of Francophone women’s solo pieces, using autobiographical storytelling to confront colonial and gendered legacies of oppression, to one that explores a socio-legal and labor history of Mexican “green card commuters.” Their work is mapping the future landscape of human rights research. Eight new PhD students have joined the Doctoral Fellows Program for this academic year.
A major focus of the Pozen Center is to provide a space for the incubation of new research collaborations that supplement and strengthen its pedagogical mission. Thanks to a generous multi-year gift from Richard and Ann Pozen, we were able to launch the new Human Rights Research Collaboratory in spring 2025. The Collaboratory will be an incubator space for faculty projects that collaborate with human rights practitioners on research initiatives. All projects supported by the Collaboratory include an undergraduate student research component—providing students with unique, hands-on, immersive research experience in direct partnership with practitioners. Two pilot projects will be undertaken under the aegis of the Collaboratory in the 2025-26 academic year.
Throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, Anjli Parrin developed the Global Human Rights Lab, a new practice space, launched in collaboration with the Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. The Lab offers third- and fourth-year undergraduate students practical experience linking human rights scholarship to real-world applications. Students contributed to the mandate of Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions and a Pozen Senior Visiting Researcher. Tidball-Binz will continue to work with the Pozen Center under the aegis of the Collaboratory for the remaining two years of his service as Special Rapporteur.
Two new faculty members joined the Pozen Center in the 2024-2025 academic year. Assistant instructional professor Ishani Dasgupta received her PhD, with distinction, from the University of Pennsylvania in anthropology and South Asian studies. Her ethnographic study of the Tibetan diasporic community offers an innovative and potentially field-transforming approach to a set of pressing human rights questions around forced migration and the status of citizenship for refugees. Dasgupta taught core courses and launched three new ones. Postdoctoral scholar María de los Ángeles Aguilar also contributed to core courses, introduced a new course on policing, and continued her research on the historical and modern roles of police forces in controlling and criminalizing marginalized populations globally.
As we continue to deepen and thicken the Pozen Center’s commitment to experiential education, we welcome Emmah Wabuke as the new director of practice. Emmah has a PhD in anthropology from Cambridge University and an LLM from Harvard. Emmah will be directing the Pozen Center’s human rights practice space, developing new practice and experiential learning opportunities. For the 2025-2026 academic year, the Pozen Center is hosting Kumud Ranjan, a postdoctoral fellow from the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. Ranjan is a political theorist of caste, race, and democracy. During his two-year tenure at the Pozen Center, he will be working on a book manuscript that thinks considers the work of Hannah Arendt, W.E.B. DuBois, and B.R. Ambedkar in conjunction.
Additionally, the Pozen Center hosts José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez, a Fall 2025 Tinker Visiting Professor through the Center for Latin American Studies. José brings vast practical expertise and experience in human rights, particularly within the Latin American context and Mexico. His unique amalgamation of skills—ranging from leading civil society organizations and representing the Mexican government on national and international stages, to litigating before the Inter-American System for both the government and victims of human rights violations—demonstrates his multifaceted proficiency. We know our students will benefit greatly from his mentorship.
In the spring of 2025, the Pozen Center hosted Julia Hall—an attorney, researcher, and advocate who previously worked for both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—as its sixteenth Pozen Visiting Professor. Hall taught a course on freedom of expression.
The Pozen Center organized 37 public-facing events in the 2024-2025 academic year. We were privileged to host anti-apartheid activist and former judge of the South African Constitutional Court, Albie Sachs, in April 2025. Sachs, who was the inaugural Pozen Visiting Professor in 2010 was delighted to renew his association with the Pozen Center. His visit included a series of events on- and off-campus: a well-attended public lecture at the International House; a lecture on art and justice that focused on the art collection at the South African Constitutional Court, held at the Elastic Arts Foundation; a discussion at the Law School with Pozen Faculty Board member Anjli Parrin; and a meeting with young journalists at the Invisible Institute. It was a wonderful visit that engaged both university and broader community audiences, intergenerational in its scope. The link to Sachs’ public lecture is here.
All these milestones notwithstanding, we recognize that we are in a moment of deep peril for human rights, nationally and internationally, with effects felt directly on university campuses around the country—including ours. During this academic year, our programming focuses on collaborative activities with other Centers on campus and with human rights centers across the country and globally, to think proactively about how we can meet the current moment in ways that maintain critical norms and values of human rights, academic freedom, and social justice. We are proud of the work that the Pozen Center has done over the last 27 years, and we are committed to ensuring that the Pozen Center continues to be a vibrant ground for the confluence of teaching, research, and practice, and a convening space that responds to the scholarly and pedagogical needs of the times.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Faculty Director
Kathleen Cavanaugh, Executive Director