Our research grant competition for the faculty and staff supports and promotes research projects on human rights related questions. Projects should make a significant contribution to ongoing scholarly and/or policy debates in the field of human rights.
Awards will prioritize primary research, including library research, fieldwork, interviewing, historical archival research, pilot studies, data collection, and data set construction. Book preparation requests are permitted and could include copy editing, indexing, and editorial assistance. Requests to provide a subvention for an open access publication or for access to databases for research will be considered. Please note that this funding is not intended to cover travel expenses related to conference attendance.
2026 Small Grant Recipients
Kathryn Libal
Professor, Social Work and Human Rights
“Supporting Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the United States during an Era of Severe Restrictionism: Volunteer and Service Provider Perspectives”
About the Project
This study examines how recent executive branch actions — particularly the Trump administration's suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and closure of the Welcome Corps — have transformed refugee resettlement services across the country. Using qualitative interviews with frontline practitioners including resettlement agency staff, lawyers, legal advocates, community sponsors, and refugee community leaders across Connecticut, New York, Kentucky, and Minnesota, the research maps how these actors are adapting to severe federal retrenchment. The grant specifically funds a two-week research residency in Louisville, Kentucky in Spring 2027 to conduct in-person interviews with lawyers, advocates, and community volunteers.
Impact
This research addresses one of the most urgent human rights challenges of our time: the dismantling of federal refugee protection infrastructure in the United States that leaves vulnerable populations — including refugees, asylum seekers, and asylees — without critical services and legal support. By centering the perspectives of frontline practitioners and documenting how communities are responding to federal retrenchment, the study generates evidence that can directly inform advocacy, policy reform, and the protection of refugee rights at both state and national levels.
Catherine Masud & Janie Cole
Assistant Professor In-Residence, Human Rights Documentary Filmmaking; Assistant Professor of Musicology
“The Making of Gabriel”
About the Project
The Making of Gabriel is a creatively visualized short documentary film that brings to life the earliest surviving autobiographical account of an enslaved Ethiopian in the early modern Indian Ocean world. Framed as a work of memory and testimony, the story follows Gabriel, a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish child kidnapped from the Ethiopian Highlands in the mid 16th century and sold into slavery across Africa, Arabia, and South Asia. Over the course of his life, Gabriel is forced to navigate multiple regimes of power—slavery, religious persecution, and imperial violence—while repeatedly refashioning his identity as a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian in a relentless pursuit of survival, dignity, and agency.
Impact
Gabriel’s story of slavery, religion, mobility, persecution, and resistance, offers rare views into an early modern world of slave trading in the Arab world, Habshi life through the porous borders of Afro-Asian communities, and ritual and religious persecution in Portuguese India. It is told through the imaginary and sumptuous soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean world brought to life in the groundbreaking musical narrative Gabriel’s Odyssey (2025), created and performed by the Kukutana Ensemble, together with interviews with leading global experts who address wider themes around religion, ritual, slavery, race, agency, and migration in the early modern Indian Ocean world and their impact on Afro-Asian communities in this period. Gabriel’s life represents a universal story of oppression, faith, migration and self-fashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans. This story has never been told in film before now.
Michael Orwicz
Associate Professor, Art History
Translation for "Evidence at the Limits of the Visible: Art, Human Rights, and Environmental Justice" by Alice Miceli
About the Project
Focused on the work of Brazilian photographer Alice Miceli, this project's exhibition (Fall 2026) and related edited catalog book explore how Miceli's experimental photographic practices investigate the violence and lethal trauma embedded in post-conflict landscapes but which remain literally invisible to the naked eye and to conventional photography.
Impact
This exhibition will bring Miceli's powerful work to new audiences in the Northeast region. Additionally, the related edited catalog will be the first monograph on this rising artistic star. The exhibition and volume will cover three of Miceli's most compelling works -- her Chernobyl Project (2006-2010), her In Depth Minefields (2014-2018) and 88 From 14, 000, her treatment of the Khmer Rouge notorious S-21 Prison. The catalog will also cover Miceli's current project, Warfront Landscapes, which productively shifts the matrix of these earlier projects to that of urban warfare.
Former Recipients
2025
- Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos
Professor of Spanish, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages
"Ernestina González Fleischman at the Crisscross of Antifascism and Human Rights" - Jeremy Pressman
Professor of Political Science
"Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC)" - Rachel Chambers
Assistant Professor of Business Law
"Research Handbook on Business and Human Rights Litigation"
2024
- Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat
Professor, Department of Political Science,
"Human Rights Norms in Turkey" - Chen Chen
Assistant Professor, Department Educational Leadership, Neag School of Education
"From Ukraine to Gaza: Identifying the “Gap” of Human Rights Discourse in Sport" - Robin Greeley, Michael R. Orwicz & José Falconi
Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Latin American Art History; Associate Professor of Art History; Assistant Professor of Art History and Human Rights
"Research travel to National Center for Civil & Human Rights; National Memorial for Peace and Justice"
2023
- Thelma Z. Abu
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography,
"Understanding and Responding to Issues of Water Security and Gender-Based Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa" - Jane Pryma
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
"Slow Rights: Trauma and Disability Rights" - Catherine Masud
Assistant Professor, Department of Digital Media & Design and Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute
"Justice Stories/Our Stories"
2022
- Jeremy Pressman & David Richards
Professor, Political Science & Director, Middle East Studies; Associate Professor, Political Science & Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute
“Evaluating Israel’s Claim of Exceptional Negative Treatment About Human Rights Violations”
2021
- Gary M. English
Distinguished Professor, Dramatics Arts
“Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form” - Sandra L. Sirota
Assistant Professor in Residence, Human Rights Institute
“Shaping an Education System that Works for Us: Youth-led Movements to Disrupt Systemic Racism in Education”
Eligibility Criteria & Requirements
- Open to UConn faculty, staff, and post-docs in all disciplines at any UConn campus.
- Applicant must be affiliated with UConn during the entire award period.
- Disbursement of funds is contingent upon receipt of any required IRB approval.
- 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.
How to Apply
Access the application via Microsoft Forms. The application requires the following materials:
- Intellectual rationale for the project, list of expected project outcomes, and methodology (three pages, double spaced, 12 point font);
- Budget narrative of research-related expenses (typically not to exceed $2000) (no more than a half page)
- Current CV
Applications for the current cycle closed on April 17, 2026. Check back here in Fall 2026 for application instructions for the 2027 cycle.
Evaluation Criteria
Proposed research projects will be evaluated for overall excellence of the proposed research project on human rights issues, understood broadly. All proposals will be reviewed and ranked by a multidisciplinary review committee comprised of Gladstein Human Rights Committee members.
- 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.
- Additional priority may be given to applications from junior faculty and 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 860-486-8739.