Our seed grant competition is meant to support and promote faculty research projects on human rights and to facilitate the writing of external grant proposals. We offer one award of $15,000 each academic year. Proposed research projects should make a significant contribution to ongoing scholarly and/or policy debates in the field of human rights. They will be evaluated for overall excellence on human rights issues, understood broadly. All proposals will be reviewed by a multidisciplinary committee chaired by the Associate Director of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.
2023 Seed Grant Recipient
Sara Silverstein
Assistant Professor, Department of History & Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute
"A Place to Exist: Histories of Statelessness from Empire to European Integration"
A Place to Exist: Histories of Statelessness from Empire to European Integration considers the history of statelessness and belonging from the perspective of people who were themselves stateless. The project examines how stateless people conceptualized rights and created mechanisms to protect rights during the period in which modern understandings of the state and of citizenship emerged, focusing on the 1910s-1960s. A Place to Exist concentrates on people labeled as minority nationalities who identified as lacking a state to represent their interests – including Ukrainians, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Macedonians, and Roma – in addition to people without citizenship who officially qualified as “stateless” under international law, and people whose identity fell outside any international legal categorization. The focus will start in Europe and will extend from there to individuals and communities who engaged with these stateless Europeans, including anti-colonial activists and American Civil Rights activists. Reclaiming lost voices reveals the same period that saw the rise of the modern nation-state was a time of vibrant thought and action for alternative ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and citizenship, while stateless people also worked pragmatically to develop institutions and procedures to protect their rights. This project makes the case that their work was indispensable to the realization of later international collaborations and organizations, of European integration, and of the theories and practices of human rights.
More about Sara Silverstein
Sara Silverstein is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, and co-director of HRI's Research Program in Humanitarianism. Her work addresses the histories of statelessness, minority rights, internationalism, public and global health, and refugees and migration, with a geographic concentration in Modern and Eastern Europe. Her first book, For Your Health and Ours: The East European History of International Health, explored international health projects and practices of development that originated in eastern European following the First World War. She has published articles and chapters on the histories of internationalism, public and international health, the right to health, and state-building and democracy in post-imperial Eastern Europe. She has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs, a Fox Fellow at Sciences Po, Paris, and a junior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Former Recipients
2022
- Manisha Desai
Professor, Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies
"Women’s Rights, Land Rights, and Climate Justice"
2021
- Alaina Brenick
Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Science
"A Right to Housing, A Right to Health: How do Connecticut Constituents View the Homeless Community’s Right to Housing During and Beyond COVID-19"
Eligibility Criteria & Requirements
- Open to full-time, permanent UConn faculty in any discipline at any UConn campus.
- Applicant must be affiliated with UConn during the entire award period.
- Applicants may apply for both the HRI Seed Grant and the HRI Small Grant, but the recipient of the HRI Seed Grant will be ineligible to receive an HRI Small Grant in the same year.
- Disbursement of funds is contingent upon receipt of any required IRB approval.
- The grant holder agrees to:
- Submit a progress report (2 page maximum) on the research project by July 30, 2025.
- The Grant holder also agrees to present at a public HRI Research Talk in the year following their Grant.
- The seed grant may be used to:
- Support graduate assistant or undergraduate student labor costs at university-established rates.
- Contribute towards course replacement costs, following the model of the Research Excellence Program. This must be approved by your department head.
- Pay for direct costs associated with travel for research or research support costs.
How to Apply
Access the application via Microsoft Forms. The application requires the following materials:
- Narrative description of the research project (5 pages, double spaced, 12 pt. font);
- Brief explanation of plans to apply for outside grants (no more than a half page);
- Budget narrative (1 page maximum);
- Bibliography for the project (1 page maximum); and
- Current CV
Application Deadline for 2024: Extended to April 15
Evaluation Criteria
The following criteria will be used in evaluating applications:
- Significance of the contribution that the project will make to knowledge in the field of human rights.
- Quality of the conception, definition, organization, and description of the project.
- Feasibility of the project, including rationale for the budget.
- Priority will be given to applicants who indicate clearly their plans to apply for external funding.
- Additional priority may be given to applications from junior faculty and to those faculty who have not received this grant in recent years.
- Applications that do not follow the guidelines for page length and supporting documents will not be considered.
Questions about the competition? Please email humanrights@uconn.edu or call 860-486-5393.