The virtual human rights library brings together resources from multiple libraries and information services, both internal and external, to create an online hub dedicated to the study of human rights. This curation is unique in its interdisciplinary concerns and focuses on writings and research from social sciences, humanities, and law.
The virtual library is continually updated with the latest academic research in issue areas, as well as with relevant films, recorded conversations, and other forms of media.
Please Note:
The Virtual Library is usable by all visitors, but the hyperlinks to materials listed are for UChicago community members with a CNet ID and password.
Please direct feedback and suggestions to Kathleen Cavanaugh.
For technical assistance, email pozenhumanrights @ uchicago.edu.
Searchable Database
Click into the dropdowns to select the disciplines, keywords, and media type for your search, and then hit "Apply."
After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France
A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it...
Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare
There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved...
Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870-1962
Professor Roberts examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. She focuses on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other populations in the colony...
Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference
Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference offers a concise and sweeping overview of citizenship's complex evolution, from ancient Rome to the present. Political leaders and thinkers still debate, as they did in Republican Rome, whether the presumed equivalence of citizens is compatible...
Coming to Terms With the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China
China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu, as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts...
Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France
Thousands of naturalized French men and women had their citizenship revoked by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Once denaturalized, these men and women, mostly Jews who were later sent to concentration camps, ceased being French on official...
Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society
Digitization has transformed the way we interact with our social, political and economic environments. While it has enhanced the potential for citizen agency, it has also enabled the collection and analysis of unprecedented amounts of personal data. This requires us...
Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China
In Disenfranchised, Joel Andreas recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped industrial relations in China over the past seven decades. Through interviews with workers and managers, Andreas provides a shop-floor perspective of the transformation of hired hands...
Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies
Europe's imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers. When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining...
Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial...