Mason Holland '23 (CLAS)

Dr. Kathy Libal

Kathryn Libal, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Social Work and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut and Director of the Human Rights Institute. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology at the University of Washington. Since 2007, she has taught at the School of Social Work and Human Rights Institute, specializing in human rights, humanitarianism and migration, and social welfare in the Middle East and United States. Her scholarship has addressed women’s and children’s rights movements in Turkey; international non-governmental organizational advocacy on behalf of Iraqi and Syrian refugees; and the localization of human rights norms and practices in the United States, with a focus on social mobilization for the right to adequate food and housing. She is currently conducting a collaborative qualitative study on the politics and practices of voluntarism and refugee resettlement in the United States and Canada. In that research she is examining how voluntarism in an era of xenophobia and backlash creates new forms of civic connection and political participation among volunteers, social service providers, and refugees. Kathryn co-edited Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and wrote Human Rights-Based Approaches to Community Practice in the United States (with Scott Harding, Springer, 2015). She also was lead editor of the contributory volume titled Advancing Human Rights in Social Work Education (Council on Social Work Education Press, 2014). She is currently completing an edited volume with S. Megan Berthold on Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the United States: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (forthcoming, Praeger). She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights and Social Work and the University of Connecticut’s liaison with the Scholars at Risk Program. She teaches courses on human rights and social work, qualitative research methods, social policy analysis, and approaches to human rights advocacy.

Sarah Renn

Sarah Renn is a Fully Accredited US Department of Justice Representative in the Immigration Legal Assistance Program of Ascentria Community Services (former Lutheran Social Services of New England), Worcester, MA.  In this role, Sarah represents human trafficking survivors, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors, humanitarian parole seekers, Temporary Protected Status applicants, and victims of crime in front of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Immigration Courts. She previously worked five years for the US government in areas of immigration and refugee affairs, including two years as an Asylum and temporary Refugee Officer in the US Department of Homeland Security. This work included processing refugee applicants from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Togo in the aftermath of civil wars and regime changes. Sarah volunteers at a local refugee resettlement project, which resettles Syrian, and soon Afghan, refugee families.

Dr. Chris Vials

Chris Vials is Director of American Studies and Professor of English at the University of Connecticut-Storrs.  His research focuses on the impact of left and right-wing movements on US culture, and since 2012 has focused on antifascism and the far right in the United States.  He the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Massachusetts, 2014) and co-editor, with Bill Mullen, of The U.S. Antifascism Reader (Verso, 2020).  He has appeared on CBC radio, PBS, and NPR to discuss the history of American fascist and antifascist movements.