Sara Silverstein

Co-Director, Research Program on Humanitarianism

Associate Professor, History and Human Rights

Sara Silverstein is an historian of public and global health and health policy, internationalism, and Modern and Eastern Europe. She is an expert on human rights, social rights and welfare, state forms and statelessness, migration and displacement, and humanitarianism. The author of For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), she is working on projects involving the history of health as a right, health and immigration, and statelessness.

At UConn, she holds a joint position as an Associate Professor of History and Human Rights, and is co-director of the Research Program on Humanitarianism at UConn’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.

Her current book project, provisionally titled Corporal Capitalism: A History of Health and Profit, addresses the history of commercial medicine and of health as a right. She is also developing a history of healthcare for displaced persons and immigrants that situates trauma, disability, and illness as an indelible part of national reconstruction and internationalism in the twentieth century, with the working title Hard Core: Displacement and Disease in Postwar Recovery. A third project is a study of rights and political forms of the modern state from the perspective of stateless activists, titled A Place to Exist: Histories of Statelessness from Empire to European Integration.

Professor Silverstein has spoken widely in North America and Europe and published on public and global health, experiments in democratic state-building and the breakdown of democracies, internationalism, human rights and social rights, state forms and statelessness, the First and Second World Wars and their aftermaths, and refugees and displacement.

She is a Fellow of the Ukrainian History Global Initiative and a Founding Fellow of the Public History Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She has been a Fox Fellow at Science Po, Paris, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Yale University’s Jackson School for Global Affairs. She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University.