Defining Human Rights featuring Mark Philip Bradley
Event Details
Our consensus on what constitutes a human right dates back only to the 1940s, when the global human rights imagination first began to take shape. In this lecture, Mark Philip Bradley will chronicle the complex histories that have formed our contemporary understanding of human rights and illustrate how that understanding has become a force behind international and local politics. In particular, he will address the Indian Supreme Court's decision last December to uphold Section 377, the colonial-era law that criminalizes sexual activities "against the order of nature," most notably, gay sex.
Mark Philip Bradley is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of International History and the College, chair of the Committee on International Relations, and faculty director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago. He is the author and coeditor of several books, including the forthcoming The United States and Global Human Rights Imagination and Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn.
Already registered? To learn more, read Bradley's article, "American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination," from Diplomatic History [PDF].
Registration
Register Online
Cost: Free, includes program and refreshments
Deadline: 11/19/2014
Program
7:30 PM-8:00 PM: Registration
8:00 PM-9:15 PM: Presentation and discussion
9:15 PM-10:00 PM: Reception
Speaker Profiles
Mark Philip Bradley (Speaker)
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of International History and the College
Mark Philip Bradley is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009), and The United States and Global Human Rights Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and the coeditor of Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (Cornell University Press, 2015); Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (Rutgers University Press, 2001). His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History and Dissent. A recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, Professor Bradley is beginning a new research project that explores the international histories of the South China Sea. He served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, is coauthoring a book on the global history of the Vietnam wars, and serves as a coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series The United States in the World.