As director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, I am interested in the relationship between the humanities and the history and concepts of human rights. The Institute is involved with the Center for the Humanities project on What Is the Human? I consider the issue of the rights of human beings to be a part of the question of what is the human. In my research and teaching, I work with feminist theory and human rights as well as issues of migration, diaspora, borders and human rights. I am currently writing a conference paper for the Modern Language Association entitled "Narrating 'Women's Rights as Human Rights: Feminist Theory, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss" for a panel entitled Narrative and the Human Rights Paradigm.

Email: ssfriedm@wisc.edu