HRI Joint Faculty

Bystrom

Kerry Bystrom

Assistant Professor, Joint Hire English & Human Rights
Gladstein Committee Member
kerry.bystrom@uconn.edu

Kerry Bystrom received a PhD in English from Princeton University for a dissertation focused on memory, literary culture, and political activism in post-dictatorship Argentina and post-apartheid South Africa. She has recently completed a monograph on cultures of democracy in South Africa, and has a variety of essays on literature, photography and performance as they relate to human rights and humanitarianism published or forthcoming in venues such as Humanity, Interventions, and the Routledge Handbook of Human Rights. She is also co-editing, with Glenn Mitoma, a special issue of the Journal of Human Rights on "Humanitarianism and Responsibility." She is a fellowship recipient from the Social Science Research Council and a former faculty member in the International Human Rights Exchange Program (Bard College, NY and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.) Current research interests include media, celebrity culture, and the changing role of the intellectual in contemporary humanitarian campaigns; the transnational history of children's rights, particularly the right to identity; and cultural flows between Latin America and Southern Africa during and after the Cold War.

Hertel

Shareen Hertel

Associate Professor, Joint Hire Political Science & Human Rights

Director of Graduate Certificate in Human Rights
Gladstein Committee Member
Economic & Social Rights Group Member
shareen.hertel@uconn.edu

Shareen Hertel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed with the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. She holds a doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University (2003). Hertel is author of Unexpected Power: Conflict and Change Among Transnational Activists (Cornell 2006) and co-editor with Lanse P. Minkler of Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement and Policy Issues (Cambridge 2007). She has published in, among others, Political Science Quarterly, Polity, International Studies Review, Global Governance, Human Rights Review, and Journal of Latin American Studies. Hertel has served as a consultant to foundations, nongovernmental organizations, and United Nations agencies in the United States, Latin America and South Asia.

Holzer

Elizabeth Holzer

Assistant Professor, Joint Hire Sociology & Human Rights
Gladstein Committee Member
elizabeth.holzer@uconn.edu

Elizabeth Holzer joined the University of Connecticut in the Fall 2010 after completing her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. In her research, she seeks to understand how and with what consequences people re-engage with politics in situations of violence and instability. She is especially concerned with the interplay between interpretive processes (like the regulation of political fear) and structural dimensions (like the distribution of authority) and how external actors like a humanitarian agency can moderate these dynamics. She is currently working on two research projects. The first project explores social protest and repression in exile with fieldwork in Liberian refugee camp in Ghana. The second explores political engagement in postconflict settings. Professor Holzer has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation.

Prakash

Nishith Prakash

Assistant Professor, Joint Hire Economics & Human Rights
nishith.prakash@uconn.edu

Nishith Prakash joined the University of Connecticut in Spring 2012 after completing his doctorate at the University of Houston, Texas and working as a post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University from July 2010 till December 2011. His primary research interests include development, labor, public policy, and health economics. One line of his work focuses on understanding the effects of affirmative action policies in India on labor market outcomes, child labor and poverty. His other work has examined topics such as the returns to English-language skills in India, effects of corruption, nutrition and child development in India, and evaluation of welfare and behavioral impacts of Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Kenya. Professor Prakash’s research uses experimental and quasi-experimental econometric techniques to obtain estimates with causal interpretations. He has experience conducting surveys in developing countries and working with large scale observational and administrative data sets. He is also a Research Fellow at Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and Member of Insights on Immigration and Development (INSIDE-SPAIN). Professor Prakash maintains a blog about his research and teaching interests at: https://sites.google.com/site/nishithprakash1978/home.

David Richards

Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic & Social Rights

David Richards is Associate Professor, Joint Hire Political Science & Human Rights
Gladstein Committee Member
Co-Director of the Economic & Social Rights Group Member
david.l.richards@uconn.edu

David Richards is Co-Director of the CIRI Human Rights Data Project (http://www.humanrightsdata.org), which annually rates the level of government respect for 15 internationally-recognized human rights in 195 countries. He has published research studying government respect for human rights, broadly defined, in a number of journals and books. He is currently writing two books: one (with Jillenne Haglund) is a global study of violence against women, and the other is a human rights textbook. His work has been funded multiple times by The National Science Foundation and The World Bank, among others.

Van Isschot

Luis van Isschot

Assistant Professor, Joint Hire in History & Human Rights
luis.van_isschot@uconn.edu

Luis van Isschot joined the University of Connecticut in the Fall of 2012. He completed his doctorate at McGill University in Montreal in 2010, after which he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research concerns the emergence of human rights movements during the Cold War period in Latin America. His first book project is focused on social movement responses to political violence in the Colombian oil enclave of Barrancabermeja, with special concern for human rights activism as a response to paramilitary violence since the early 1980s. His current research is focused on the impact of international justice in countries that have experienced armed conflict, including Colombia, Peru and Guatemala. In 2012 he conducted research at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica. He has previously worked for human rights organizations in North America, Latin America and Africa, and carried out investigations into the security concerns of human rights defenders in conflict zones. He is currently teaching courses on human rights in Latin America, as well as Latin American colonial history.

Glenn Mitoma

Assistant Professor in Residence, at the Human Rights Institute
glenn.mitoma@uconn.edu

Glenn Mitoma has been at the University of Connecticut since 2008, after completing his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, first as a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Research Program in Humanitarianism and now as an Assistant Professor in Residence at the Human Rights Institute. Glenn’s research focuses on the twentieth century history of human rights and his forthcoming book Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power examines the link between the coincident mid-twentieth century ascendancies of the U.S. as the preeminent global power and human rights as the most compelling global ethic. His current project is a biography of the Lebanese philosopher and diplomat—and prominent UDHR author—Charles H. Malik. Glenn also teaches a variety of courses in the Human Rights Major and Minor, including Introduction to Human Rights, History of Human Rights, Human Rights Through Film, and the History of Humanitarianism.