Kathryn Libal

Professor, Social Work and Human Rights

Kathryn Libal is professor of social work and human rights at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and former director of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute. Libal has published on women and children’s rights movements in Turkey and on the advocacy of international non-governmental organizations on behalf of Iraqi refugees. For nearly the past two decades she has collaboratively conducted research on voluntarism and refugee resettlement in the United States, Canada, and the Middle East. Currently, she and colleagues S. Megan Berthold and Scott Harding, as well as a team of graduate assistants, examine how voluntarism in an era of xenophobia and backlash creates new forms of civic connection and political participation. Libal has co-edited several contributory volumes, including the most recent book, Beyond Borders: The Human Rights of Noncitizens at Home and Abroad (Cambridge, 2021), and her scholarship appears in the Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, among other outlets. Libal is UConn’s liaison with the Scholars at Risk Program and Welcome Corps on Campus Program and is lead organizer of a national scholar-practitioner body called the Refugee Resettlement Research Working Group. Most recently she founded and is co-chair of the Welcome Quilt Collective which provides training to those who want to learn to sew and share quilts with new Americans and their families.  Libal received a BA in comparative religion from the Lewis and Clark College and an MA and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington.