Professor, Social Work and Human Rights
University of Connecticut
Kathryn Libal, Ph.D., is director of the Human Rights Institute and a professor of social work and human rights at the University of Connecticut. Since 2007, she has taught at the UConn School of Social Work and Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, specializing in human rights, refugee resettlement, social welfare, historical and qualitative research methods. Her scholarship has focused on the Middle East and United States. Currently she is researching the politics and practices of voluntarism and refugee resettlement in the United States; academic freedom and human rights; and histories of human rights activism in the United States.
Libal co-edited Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism (CUP, 2011) and authored, with Scott Harding, Human Rights-Based Approaches to Community Practice in the United States (Springer, 2015). She also co-edited Advancing Human Rights in Social Work Education (CSWE Press, 2014); Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives (Praeger, 2019) and co-edited an open access volume of essays titled Beyond Borders: The Human Rights of Noncitizens at Home and Abroad (Cambridge, 2021). Libal serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights and Social Work and is UConn’s liaison with the Scholars at Risk Program. She is a founding member of the executive committee of Scholars at Risk USA chapter and executive committee member of the Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies.
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