Congratulations to Human Rights Studies for Engaging Humanities Award

The University of California Humanities Research Institute has awarded the UC Davis Human Rights Studies Program one of its first Engaging Humanities seed grants, intended to support UC faculty in pursuing thoughtful engagement with diverse publics beyond the academy. Alongside collaborators from UCLA, The History Project, and a community partner, The Genocide Education Project (GenEd), Human Rights Studies will use these funds to pilot a summer institute in genocide and human rights studies for California high school teachers. A prototype workshop is being planned for summer 2021.

Modeled on similar National Endowment for the Humanities programs, the institutes will fulfill a critical need to build an effective, California-based tool to drive high-quality, cutting-edge humanities research, and best practices in these fields to the front-lines of the state’s secondary education sector. The project will also address the programmatic gap left by the collapse of NEH funding for similar programs. 

“California’s communities of genocide and mass atrocity survivors have the right to have their collective stories told in an accurate and effective manner in state-supported education,” Keith David Watenpaugh, Director of Human Rights Studies and project PI, explained. “The University of California can stand alongside and support these publics in this project, fostering dialog, translating research, and building a new approach to these critical fields for underserved groups from a position of scholarly excellence in the humanities with this work.”

Award Title: Genocide and Human Rights Studies for Twenty-First Century Californians: Summer Institutes for High School Educators
Grant Program: UCHRI, Engaging Humanities