On the occasion of celebrating 30 years of bringing students and faculty together, the Baden-Württemberg/Connecticut partnership highlights the recent establishment of the hugely successful Human Rights Research Consortium, co-founded by German Studies professors Katharina von Hammerstein and Sebastian Wogenstein.

“For both of us, the Human Rights Institute has been an intellectual home at UConn – a forum where you have people from different disciplines working together,” explains Wogenstein of himself and his founding co-director, Katharina von Hammerstein, a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emerita of German Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “That was the model for this consortium. We thought that we could build something like the Human Rights Institute; not in terms of its institutional structure, but as a network that would include colleagues from various institutions in Baden-Württemberg and in Connecticut, a network that promotes collaboration on different issues relating to human rights. And it’s really worked out well.”

The Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) provides an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-institutional platform to promote and support academic collaboration on a variety of human rights topics between researchers and research groups at fifteen universities and other research institutions in the partner states of Connecticut (USA) and Baden-Württemberg (Germany). Inspired by the rich exchange within and beyond the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute (HRI) and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), the Consortium aims to advance human rights research, education, public discourse, and political decision-making in ways that build bridges between academia and everyday life. 

The new phase of the HRRC was initiated with an international conference accompanying festivities around the 30th anniversary of the two states’ collaboration, and more information on the future of the consortium is available from this recent UConn Today article.