The Human Rights Institute
Associate Director

Eleni Coundouriotis is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Institute.

Eleni Coundouriotis received her BA in English at Georgetown University and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Before coming to the University of Connecticut in 1993, she taught for two years for the Committee on Degrees in Literature at Harvard University. She has been affiliated with the Human Rights Program at the University of Connecticut since 2001.

Her research interests are interdisciplinary with a particular focus on methods of historical narration across different disciplines and in a comparative context. In Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (1999), Coundouriotis proposes a literary history for the emergence and development of African fiction in the context of ethnography, the traditions of European narrative history, and the colonial encounter. A sustained theme of the book is the role that violence played in defining the subject matter of the African novel and the insistence of Africans on the historicist mission of their fiction. This dual interest in violence and history has shaped her turn to human rights. Africa remains an important focus of her research.

Currently she is completing a manuscript entitled Humanitarian Fictions that examines humanitarian agency in nineteenth and twentieth-century novels from Europe, the US, and Africa. An essay from this book project is forthcoming in Human Rights Quarterly.