UConn Announces 2 New Endowed Human Rights Professorships

STORRS, CT — Endowments have created two new professorships at the University of Connecticut's groundbreaking human rights program.

Former U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd and the late Wiktor Osiatyński, an eminent constitutional scholar whose fight against injustice spanned the world, will be honored via the positions for "their inspiring legacies."

The UConn Board of Trustees recently approved creation of the Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice and the Wiktor Osiatyński Chair in Human Rights, both of which will be part of the Human Rights Institute in the Office of Global Affairs.

The chair positions are both endowed, meaning they are funded by gifts specifically given to the UConn Foundation by donors to "support scholarship, outreach, and teaching in human rights and related critical areas," UConn officials said.

The Dodd Chair will head Dodd Human Rights Impact programs and be filled after an international search that is slated to begin in August, officials said.

The first Osiatyński Chair will be a current UConn faculty member who will be selected over the coming academic year in time to start in fall 2023, officials said.

UConn is a national leader in the field of human rights and is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Human Rights Institute in the 2022-23 academic year. The Dodd Center for Human Rights has been open since 1995 and, among other notable items, houses the papers from the Nuremberg Trials that held Nazi war criminals for their actions in Works War II.

This year also marks 10 years since UConn established an undergraduate major in human rights, becoming the first public U.S. university to do so, after having already created it as a minor in 2001. HRI also has other human rights programs offered at the masters and graduate certificate levels.