A new human rights program will change the way academic departments and student groups conduct human rights-related research and activities.

Coordinated by Helen Stacy, a senior lecturer at the Law School, the program will launch on Oct. 14 under the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), featuring speakers from several academic departments including law, engineering, political science and medicine. The purpose of this new program, according to Adam Rosenblatt, a Ph.D. candidate in modern thought and literature, is to get dialogue about human rights scholarship across disciplinary divides.

“Because it touches almost every sphere of human life, human rights scholarship has become an interdisciplinary venture,” Rosenblatt said. “For example, you have people in literature writing about human rights in the novel and you have anthropologists studying a particular women’s human rights movement in a country in Africa or Southeast Asia.”

For many students, this new program will provide a central academic group that will deal with human rights, something Stanford has lacked until now.

“We want to make sure we learn from each other and pool our energies,” Stacy said. “And also to create a critical mass of human rights professors for students to access from across the University.

“[CDDRL] is interested in bridging the worlds between academic work and real life outcomes,” Stacy continued.

Faculty members expect this “bridge” to be directed toward both governments and non-government actors who shape human rights policy.

Students with a strong interest in human rights seem receptive, even enthusiastic, about this program, with the prospect of a centralized human rights program arousing hopes from undergraduate and graduate students alike.

“I’ve been waiting since I got here almost four and a half years ago for an interdisciplinary human rights center,” Rosenblatt said.

Anjali Albuquerque ‘11 echoed that sentiment. “There was really no centralized academic group that dealt with human rights,” she said. “At Stanford, what we have are a lot of niches.”

The goals of this program are many, but there is, as of now, no set template for how it will operate. There are, however, ideas of it acting as a clearinghouse or as a platform for faculty-related research, as well as a way to grow the program of student internships by working with the Haas Center and the McCoy Family Center.

“The outcome, we hope, is that there will be more human rights-related research among faculty and more human rights activity among students,” Stacy said.