Strategic Working Groups

Humanities and Human Rights || 2004

This pilot seminar for the Mellon Strategic Groups was led by David Cohen (Professor of Rhetoric and Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center) and Victoria Kahn (Professor of Comparative Literature and of English) in 2004.

Its co-conveners noted in their proposal that there is tremendous interest among undergraduate and graduate students in this area but that most human rights courses on the Berkeley campus are offered in the social sciences and the professional schools. This is not because humanities scholars have little to contribute to thinking about human rights, but rather because they are slow to define as “human rights” research the significant work they are doing in areas such as trauma and memory, violence, colonialism and oppression, genocide, creative freedom and political censorship, the aesthetics and architecture of monuments and memorials, and environmental practices and representations. The hope is that thinking and teaching about human rights on campus and in the community will be enriched: that research in the humanities will influence and be integrated into legal, political, and social scientific approaches and that they, in turn, will have an impact on how scholars in the humanities think about their scholarship and pedagogy.

About the Organizers

David Cohen is the director of the UC Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center, the Anker Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at UC Berkeley, the Senior Fellow in International Humanitarian Law and the Director of the Asian International Justice Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, and a former professor of Law and social thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous publications and directs an international project on the WWII war crimes trials in Asia, the Pacific, and Europe. He has also monitored and reported on the East Timor trials before the Serious Crimes Panel in Dili and the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court in Jakarta. Currently, he is engaged in a comparative study of international criminal hybrid tribunals in East Timor, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, and Kosovo and is writing a book on war crimes trials from WWII to today. Dr. Cohen received his J.D. at UCLA’s School of Law and his Ph.D. in classics and ancient history from Cambridge.

Victoria Kahn works on 17th-century English literature, the literature of the European Renaissance, and early modern political theory. She is the author, most recently, of Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, 2004). This book explores the emergence of contract theory in the literature and political thought of mid 17th-century England. It argues that contract theory should be seen as part of the linguistic turn of early modern thought, when government was imagined in terms of the poetic power to bring new artifacts into existence. Contract theory should thus be seen not simply as the forerunner of liberalism but as anticipating the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics.