Led by Catherine Gallagher (English), Alan Tansman (East Asian Languages and Cultures), and Thomas Laqueur (History), the 2007-2008 G.R.O.U.P. Team worked on the first phase of a larger project (to develop a campus-wide inter-divisional undergraduate concentration in human rights) by investigating one particular human rights topic on the status, rights, welfare, experience, subjectivity, and culture of civilians in countries at war, primarily during the last 100 years.

Within the humanities a large literature has already developed on this topic and is fast turning into an interdisciplinary subfield, often referred to as ‘the cultures of war.’ Researchers have produced studies of the relation between total war and modernity, air war and subjectivity, military technology and the visual arts, gender and sexuality in the experience and representations of warfare, changing perceptions of the ‘human,’ and the cultural consequences of global dislocations.

One third of the team was devoted to the study of the secondary literature, with the goal of producing a descriptive bibliography. Concomitantly, another third of the team began assembling descriptive bibliographies of primary works, assessing their availability, and (when necessary and practical) making and storing digital copies. A third part of the team investigated both human rights curricular and internship programs on other campuses and the human-rights related scholarship and teaching now undertaken on this campus, with the aim of recruiting teachers and designing courses for the academic year 2008-09.

The students in the team were intimately involved in planning a program for themselves and their peers. In the short run, the project resulted in the planning and coordination of courses on civilians and war to be taught in the humanities in 2008-09. Students and faculty jointly produced two source books on the cultures of war, and a resource book describing campus researchers, programs, and materials, as well as similar programs on other campuses.