The objective of my doctoral work is threefold: 1) to push beyond discourses that treat rights as transhistorical, or even post-historical, by undertaking a genealogical study of the vital and evolving life of rights; 2) to interrogate how rights were born in the public sphere of the eighteenth and nineteenth century; 3) to probe the ways in which research in the humanities, including the theoretical and historical study of literature and culture, can make important contributions to the current debate on human rights.
I am also working on a new program, The Public Humanities @ Western, which is designed to enhance the Faculty of Arts and Humanities’ commitment to the promotion of innovative forms of publicly engaged knowledge creation, experiential learning, and campus-community collaboration. Bringing together faculty, students, staff, and public partners, the program aims to address common problems as well as opportunities that arise between the campus and community. It also seeks to foster a more recognized place for public scholarship as an important mode of academic inquiry, and to encourage young scholars across the disciplines to pursue research projects aimed towards broader publics and forms of engagement. Above all, the program is designed to cultivate a renewed spirit of citizenship and engagement through arts and humanities research and collaboration.