Two UChicago scholars, Chiara Galli and William Schultz, have joined the Pozen Center’s Faculty Board, furthering the center’s commitment to approaching human rights from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Galli, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development, studies international migration, often focusing on the experiences of child migrants.
Schultz, an Assistant Professor in the Divinity School, conducts research on the historical intersection of American religion, politics, and capitalism.
Galli’s first book, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the United States, was published this year by the University of California Press.
Her current research includes two major studies. The first is a large-scale, data-driven investigation of case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in US immigration court. The second is an ethnographic study of asylum seekers in Chicago.
Before entering academia, she worked in the nonprofit sector and was a researcher for the Italian National Contact Point of the European Migration Network.
“Since arriving at UChicago last fall, I’ve been teaching the second sequence of the Human Rights in World Civilizations course,” Galli says. “Many of my students are interested in careers in the human rights field. I’ve enjoyed discussing the key debates in human rights with them, and I look forward to finding more ways to bring my expertise on migrant and refugee rights to conversations at the Pozen Center.”
Schultz’s first book, Evangelical Capital: The Spiritual Economy of Colorado Springs (under contract with UNC Press) tells the story of how evangelical Christianity and free-market capitalism transformed the city of Colorado Springs into an epicenter of American conservatism.
His next project, The Wages of Sin: Faith, Fraud, and Religious Freedom in Modern America, will examine how major instances of financial fraud have interacted with American ideas about religion.
Schultz’s association with the Pozen Center began last spring, when he taught a course on the global politics of religious freedom as part of the center’s study abroad quarter.
He looks forward, he says, to seeing how engagement with the UChicago human rights community might inform his own work on the history of the idea of a right to religious expression.
“On a more institutional level,” Schultz says, “I would love to develop a closer connection between the Divinity School and the Pozen Center. We have people working here on ethical and historical questions that are very pertinent to the development of human rights in the modern world. So I’m hoping we can be in deeper conversation. We talk a lot about interdisciplinarity, but it’s not always put into practice. But this seems like a place where we can really link up our concerns.”
“We are delighted to have Chiara and Will join the Pozen Faculty Board for what each of them bring as scholars, teachers and mentors but also as part of our ongoing efforts to deepen the interdisciplinary reach of the Center across the university’s Divisions and Schools,” said Faculty Director Mark Philip Bradley.