News posted under Research

Doctoral students whose research intersects with human rights themes are invited to apply for this competitive yearlong fellowship opportunity. Fellows will meet throughout the academic year, typically twice per quarter, with members of the Pozen Center faculty. At the end of the academic year, Fellows will have made tangible progress on a piece of work and present it in the Doctoral Seminar.

The fellowship award supports one year of work after graduation at a non-governmental organization, government agency, or international body dedicated to human rights.

With research funding from the Pozen Family Center of Human Rights, Sociology Ph.D. student Reyna Hernandez aims to further understand how former prison inmates who were wrongfully convicted and now exonerated experienced incarceration. This work shows how the legal system’s miscarriages of justice perpetually transform the prison experience.

Watch the Pozen Center’s 2020-21 Human Rights BA Fellows present their thesis research findings and analyses.

The Pozen Center is pleased to announce the appointment of Lindsay Gifford as Assistant Research Professor.

Rebecca Ewert (PhD Candidate, Sociology), a 2019 Pozen PhD Research Grant awardee, makes a timely examination of how people with different social characteristics (i.e. race, class, gender, urban/rural locale) are recovering economically and emotionally from a 2018 megafire disaster in Northern California.

Watch the 2019-20 Human Right Lab Fellows present on their fascinating BA theses.

"I am interested in both the objects and subjects of social change." —Allison Reed is a PhD student in Sociology. Her current research explores the social objective of expanding affordable housing.

"My research looks at... how Syrian artists who have relocated to Lebanon produce art that activates a variety of ethical standpoints vis-à-vis the conflict in Syria." —Jenna Antonucci is a PhD student in Anthropology. Her research also explored how Syrian artists have reconfigured their networks of support and care, despite their precarious legal status in Lebanon.

A peaceful, stable future for Colombia still faces many challenges, but on Conflict Resolution Day, we recognize the great strides being made to make Colombia a country that better manages and resolves conflict across many levels.

“Support from the Pozen Center allowed me to begin pursuing the ways that discourses around human rights and national belonging intertwine in a multicultural neighborhood in Oslo, Norway.”--Janet Connor is a PhD student in Anthropology. Her research focuses on questions of citizenship, migration, linguistic registers, and urban change in a neighborhood in central Oslo, Norway.

Tejas Parasher is a PhD student in Political Science. His research interests are in the history of political thought, comparative political theory, and global intellectual history, especially on questions of state sovereignty, decolonization, and democratization in the first half of the twentieth century, with a regional focus on South Asia.

Emma Stone Mackinnon is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Imperial Promises: The Contested Politics of Human Rights in the Midcentury,” is supervised by Jennifer Pitts, Mark Bradley, Robert Gooding-Williams, Patchen Markell, and Lisa Wedeen. Her work is forthcoming in "Humanity" and the "Blackwell Companion to Arthur Danto." She is also co-coordinator of the Human Rights Workshop.

Lael is a PhD/JD candidate in the Department of History and the Law School. His research focuses on American lawyers engaged with international law and human rights in the 1940s.

Hadji Bakara is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. He is writing a literary history of human rights in the twentieth-century.

Mary Bunn is a third year PhD student in the School of Social Service Administration. Her research focuses on rehabilitation from torture and severe violence with attention to the role of social bonds and social connection in healing.

The Pozen Center supports research projects that allow University of Chicago faculty to explore critical dimensions of human rights thought and practice. Now accepting applications for projects beginning July 1, 2017.

Scholars who engage the topic of human rights find themselves confronted with a massive and multi-disciplinary literature.  The subject of human rights can bring out the best of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary scholarship: exciting conversations develop among people working in diverse fields. But "human rights" scholarship can also illustrate all the pitfalls and challenges of a truly multi-disciplinary field. Sometimes debating scholars talk past each other rather than to each other, their misunderstandings exacerbated by different methodological approaches. Sometimes a writer in one discipline dismisses the concerns of another due to disciplinary tunnel vision. And sometimes scholars working in one area miss the relevant conversations going on in some other corner of the academy because there's just too much to read and keep up with.

Gabriel Velez is a third year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Human Development. His research focuses on how adolescents in conflict and post-conflict contexts construct identities as citizens.

Ilana Miller is a fourth year doctoral student in the History Department. Her project uncovers the untold story of the writers, filmmakers and other members of the cultural community who actively sought to make Jewish experiences a central part of their works.