The Pozen Center for Human Rights supports doctoral student research that makes a significant contribution to the study of human rights. We grant awards of up to $5,000 to University of Chicago doctoral students in any year of their program.

Funding

  • Funds can be used to support travel or other expenses related to research projects, such as books, software, copying, temporary lodging, and recording devices or cameras.
  • Funds will be available in late June of the application year.
  • Projects should be completed within one year.

Eligibility

  • Applicants must be UChicago PhD students.
  • Applicants must be working on a research project that engages human rights concepts and discourse.
  • Priority will be given to applicants who have not previously received this research grant.

How to Apply

  • Applications are due March 30, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. CST.
  • Apply online.
  • The application requires a statement of purpose, a budget, a CV, and a letter of support from your faculty advisor.

Learn More

For more information about the Human Rights Doctoral research grant, please contact Deputy Director, Adam Avrushin

PhD Research Grantees

2023

  • Sabena Allen (Anthropology)
    “The Importance of Haa Kuusteeyí – “Our Way of Life”: Tlingit Survivance Through Ongoing Apocalypse”
  • Nahomi Linda Esquivel (History)
    “Administrating Legality: Non-Resident Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture’s Labor and Legal Regimes”
  • Emma Gilheany (Anthropology)
    “Project to Repatriate Images to Hopedale, Nunatsiavut”
  • Zachary Klamann (Political Science)
    “Power Crisis: The Roots of South Africa's Crises of Electricity and Democracy”
  • Emily Mulford (Anthropology)
    “'Truth’ and Reconciliation? Enforced Disappearance, Material Evidence, and Conspiracy Theorists in Argentina”
  • Sebastian Ortega (Sociology)
    “The Settler Colonial Policing of Chicano/Indigenous Street and Prison Gangs”
  • Hera Shakil (Comparative Human Development)
    “The Politics of “Providing” Rights:  How Democratic Rights are Being Curbed for Welfare Provision in India”
  • Sheila Shankar (The Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice )
    “Surviving Supervised Visitation, Seeking Safety: Court-mandated Mothers Navigating Domestic Violence and Post-separation Parenting”

2022

  • Andrew Atwell (Anthropology)  
    “Settling the Good: Ethical Imagination, Temporal Paradox, and the Settlement of Israel's Urban Interior”
  • Celina Doria (Crown Family School of Social Work)
    Cartographies of Reproduction: Mapping the Dynamics of Cross-border Abortion Care Between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez”
  • Anna Fox (Sociology)
  • Myungji Lee (Anthropology)
    “Between Authority and Authoritarianism: How Majoritarian Sensibilities Inform the Bureaucratic Governance of Religion in Turkey”
  • Sinja Leonelli (Booth School of Business)
    “Heterogeneity in Whistleblowing Concerns: Evidence from the Queer Community ”
  • Reed McConnell (Anthropology)
    “Imperial Abandonment: Contamination, the State, and Environmental Rights in Late Industrial California”
  • Helena Ratte (Anthropology)
    “Securing Women in War and Peace: Technocracy and the Politics of Gender after the Cold War”
  • Ellen Richmond (Anthropology)
    “Ecologies of Care: Landscape, Poetry, and Health in a Somali Border Town”
  • Madeleine Stevens (Political Science)
    “Habeas (Non) Corpus: Enforced Disappearance and Repertoires of Repression”
  • Matthew Zipf (Committee on Social Thought)
    “Photographing Civil Rights: A Legal Eye”

Program Details