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.
Searchable Database
Click into the dropdowns to select the disciplines, keywords, and media type for your search, and then hit "Apply."
Edward Berenson The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town (Norton, 2019)
On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that...
Pierre Birnbaum The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds paraded through the streets, threatening to attack Jews and destroy Jewish-owned businesses. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish...
Joëlle Bahloul Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962 (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Recalling how they lived in a single house that was occupied by several Jewish and Muslim families, in the generation before Algerian independence, Joelle Bahloul's informants build up a multi-voice microhistory of a way of life that came to an...
Moon-Kie Jung Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present (Stanford University Press, 2015)
Racism has never been simple. It wasn't more obvious in the past, and it isn't less potent now. From the birth of the United States to the contemporary police shooting death of an unarmed Black youth, Beneath the Surface of...
Benjamin Nathans Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press, 2004)
A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of...
Ethan B. Katz The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015)
Headlines from France suggest that Muslims have renewed an age-old struggle against Jews and that the two groups are once more inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. The Burdens of Brotherhood is a sweeping history of Jews and...
Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014)
Claudia Rankine's bold book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the...
Wasana Wongsurawat The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation (University of Washington Press, 2019)
Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent historiography has placed progress—or lack...
Emmanuelle Saada Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
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...
Loretta Kim Ethnic Chrysalis: China's Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard University Press, 2019)
Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The Qing...
Please Note:
While the Virtual Library is now live for use, we are still working to update its contents and improve its functionality.
It 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.