The Institute of Human Rights at Emory provides an opportunity for Emory faculty and students to further their understanding of the theories and issues of human rights. Faculty in several schools at Emory University—including the Emory College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Law, the Rollins School of Public Health, the Goizueta Business School, the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and the Candler School of Theology—have been involved in building an academic human rights program at Emory University.




The Institute of Human Rights is administered by an Executive Director and two programmatic directors as detailed below.



Dabney Evans,

Executive Director


Dabney Evans is Executive Director of the Emory University Institute of Human Rights. She received her doctoral degree in 2011 in law from the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom) and her Master of Public Health degree in 1998. Currently a Senior Associate Faculty in the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Evans teaches courses in "Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Human Rights" and "Health and Human Rights." In addition, Evans has served as a training instructor to more than 1,000 public health practitioners from over 20 countries.

Evans was co-principal investigator for the “Tibet Trauma Study” which examined trauma, mental health and perceptions of human rights among adolescent Tibetan refugees. Evans was conference planning chair of the international conference, “Lessons Learned from Rights Based Approaches to Health” which brought together more than 350 participants from 40 countries in April 2005. Between 2002-2004, Evans was coordinator of an intensive public health study trip to Havana, Cuba for Master’s level students and now serves on the Medical Education in Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC), a non-governmental organization whose aim is to promote sharing of medical practice, education, policies and research that contribute to improving health care quality and accessibility in the USA, Cuba and throughout the world.

Evans a member of the Delta Omega Public Health Honor Society, Omicron Delta Kappa National Service Honor Society and chair of the International Human Rights Committee of the American Public Health Association. Evans is a member of the 2012 Shadow Reporting coalition which will highlight the United States record on human rights and racial discrimination and obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination. 

She serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Trauma and Torture Survivors, the Refuge Media Project and the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship. Evans is faculty advisor to two student groups: Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) based in the Emory University Medical School and Human Rights Action (HuRA) based in the Rollins School of Public Health. In 2007 she was the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award.

Evans has recently published a curriculum based on the HBO documentary film Sergio, a biography of former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Sergio Viera de Mello. She is co-editor of "Rights Based Approaches to Public Health" the proceeds of a which go towards the APHA Paul Hunt Scholarship to support student attendance at the Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association. She also plans to publish her recently completed dissertation research which focuses on the nondiscriminatory provision of the right to health in several countries.

Evans is an avid capoeira practitioner with the group Passo A Frente and fluent in Portuguese.



David R. Davis,

Director of Educational Programs


David R. Davis is Director of Educational Programs for the Institute of Human Rights.  As such Davis coordinates the educational programming associated with the graduate certificate in Human Rights as well as the proposed undergraduate minor in human rights.  Davis’s primary appointment is in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.  Davis’s research interests include: international relations, domestic politics and international conflict, political violence and ethnic conflict, defense economics and the political economy of development. His teaching interests include: international relations, human rights, political violence, research methods. Current research projects include; the durable resolution of ethnic conflict, democratization and ethnic conflict, crisis escalation and domestic-international conflict linkages.  Currently Davis is focusing primarily on the development of a track in human rights via the International Studies major within the Department of Political Science.

Edward Queen,
Director of Research Programs

Edward L. Queen is Director of Research Programs for the Institute of Human Rights. He directs the D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership at Emory University’s Center for Ethics. He received his B.A. from Birmingham-Southern College, his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and his J.D. from the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis. Prior to joining the Center for Ethics, Queen served as Faculty and Curriculum Development Advisor to the Faculty of Law of South East European University, Macedonia where he taught courses on the transition to democracy. Among the human rights organizations with which he has worked are the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of the Republic of Macedonia and the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Queen also served as administrator of the International Human Rights Internship Program at the I. U. School of Law—Indianapolis. The founding director of both the Religion and Philanthropy Project at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy and of the Islamic Society of North America's Fellowship Program in Nonprofit Management and Governance and a former program officer at Lilly Endowment, Inc., Queen has consulted with numerous nonprofit, governmental, and educational organizations, including the, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Independent Sector, USAID, and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Photo Credit (top image): UNESCO/Henri Hiribarne

   
   
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