The Donia Human Rights Center, housed in the International Institute at the University of Michigan, is delighted to host a special lecture to launch the Robert J. Donia Graduate Student Fellowship with a leading historian of human rights, Samuel Moyn, Yale University.

The Robert J. Donia Graduate Student Fellowship was established by a generous donation from Robert J. Donia (M.A.’74; Ph.D. ’76 History). Donia, a scholar and historian of the region of the former Yugoslavia and a human rights advocate, has written many scholarly books and articles. He has also been called as an expert historical witness in the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and for 14 other war crimes trials at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. To encourage such impactful scholarship on human rights, the Fellowship offers one summer grant of $5,000 to support a graduate student engaged in research on human rights. The student grantee will conduct research leading to the writing of a paper on a relevant topic of her or his choosing with an emphasis on historical analysis. It is expected that during the spring and/or summer, the grantee will work on this research project full time in consultation with a faculty advisor(s).

Samuel Moyn is a perfect speaker to mark the launch of this Fellowship with the Donia Human Rights Center Special Lecture to talk about his recent book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. His lecture “Human Rights in the Neoliberal Maelstrom” takes place Thursday, February 7, at 4:00 pm on the 10th floor of Weiser Hall, 500 Church Street, Ann Arbor. The lecture is free and open to the public. The Donia Human Rights Center is a prestigious venue for renowned scholars and practitioners who have made significant contributions to the advancement of human rights in the world.

Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and professor of history at Yale University. Moyn is an intellectual historian who has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory, and he has written a number of influential books on human rights in the last decade. His trilogy of human rights history: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), Christian Human Rights (2015), and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), transformed the historiography of human rights and reoriented contemporary debates about human rights politics. A frequent contributor to policy debates through his writings in Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, he exemplifies a model of a human rights historian who conducts rigorous work that has implications on contemporary politics.

This event is co-sponsored by the University of Michigan: Department of History, Department of Sociology, and Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.