Positive impact
Groundbreaking Human Rights Studies Program marks 25 years
By Emily Halnon
Anna Grant-Bolton ’25 says she wants to make a difference in the world—and she says she feels ready to do it thanks to Trinity College’s Human Rights Studies Program.
“The jump between the work that I’m doing at Trinity with human rights studies and what I hope to do immediately following graduation does not feel like a very big leap,” she says.
Grant-Bolton’s sentiment is just how program leaders want students to feel, as the Human Rights Studies Program aims to prepare students to become human rights leaders and advocates—at Trinity and beyond.
“Since its inception, the Human Rights Studies Program has empowered students to do the work that’s needed to make a difference,” says founding director Maryam Elahi.
Adds Ben Carbonetti, current director of the Human Rights Studies Program and senior lecturer in human rights studies, “We want our students to learn how to use their interdisciplinary human rights education as a through line to think about the world’s big issues in a way that enables them to make a positive impact.”
The program, which just marked its 25th anniversary, has been committed to excellence in the study and practice of human rights through a robust interdisciplinary curriculum, a plethora of opportunities for experiential learning, and a commitment to fostering critical thinking and essential skills through ongoing dialogue and debate about human rights issues.
With human rights challenges dominating current headlines, conversations, and lived realities around the world, it might seem obvious that academic institutions such as Trinity would incorporate the study of human rights into their educational offerings.
Trinity, though, was at the forefront of prioritizing human rights as an academic path. When the College created the groundbreaking Human Rights Studies Program in 1998, it was the first liberal arts college to establish a program focused solely on the study of human rights. While there wasn’t a strong move for similar efforts across the nation at the time, it immediately was a hit at Trinity, according to Elahi, who drew on her experience with Amnesty International to shape and launch it. She’d joined Trinity a few months prior to head its Office of International Programs but found herself missing human rights work and saw an opportunity to create an undergraduate human rights program at Trinity.
“Our students wanted to learn about what was happening around the globe and better understand how they could make the world a better place,” says Elahi. “That was the promise of a human rights education; it could empower you to make a difference.”
When Elahi originally proposed the idea for the program, she was met with enthusiastic support from the administration and faculty members, who were excited to collaborate across disciplines and to help build new courses for the major. Elahi leveraged her connections to recruit many notable heads of state and human rights advocates and leaders from around the world to speak on campus and to participate in events including an annual lecture series. Some of the guests during the early years included Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan; Patricia Murphy Derien, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs for President Jimmy Carter; Martin O’Brien, a human rights activist from Northern Ireland; and Eyad El-Sarraj, a prominent Palestinian psychiatrist and internationally recognized human rights advocate.
Elahi also launched a human rights scholar-in-residence and offered internships and summer fellowships so students could get real-world experience. “We wanted students to have the chance to roll up their sleeves and get a real sense of the kind of work you need to do to make meaningful progress in this field,” she says.
While the program has evolved over the last quarter century, its mission has remained the same. Carbonetti says that promise of a human rights education continues to draw students to the program, which graduated its largest class yet in 2024.
“Today’s students are really interested in learning how they can make a difference,” says Carbonetti, who took over the program in 2020, at a time when faculty and students were showing immense energy and momentum to effect change in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the corresponding surge in the Black Lives Matter movement. “Students recognize that the world has a lot of challenges, and they want to understand what tools are available to them to try and address these challenges,” Carbonetti says.
One of the main tenets of the program is helping students appreciate that the best toolbox is shaped by an interdisciplinary liberal arts education, according to Carbonetti. Students in the Human Rights Studies Program integrate classes from disciplines across political science, law, arts, English, public policy, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience, and it’s not unusual for them to double major. The program’s curriculum also includes a strong arts component, so students learn about the power of storytelling and building empathy for human rights through that field.
“We want students to recognize that you can’t just stay in your lane and hope to solve any of these problems,” says Carbonetti. “Human rights sits at the nexus of so many disciplines, and we want students to learn many different things so they can think creatively and critically about some of the world’s most complicated problems.”
Carbonetti says the program has grown over the last 25 years, thanks to support from the administration and contributing faculty members and vital backing from donors including Everett Elting Jr. ’58, P’85, ’87 and wife Joanne P’85, ’87 and Peter Blum ’72. Donor support has allowed the hiring of the program’s first full-time positions and tenure-track faculty members, including Diana Aldrete, assistant professor of language and culture studies and human rights studies, and Christina Heatherton, who, thanks to the Eltings’ endowment of a professorship that supports the program’s first fully tenured faculty member, is the inaugural Everett and Joanne Elting Associate Professor for Human Rights and Global Citizenship.
Carbonetti highlights other significant changes in recent years, including expanding programmatic offerings such as the Trinity Prison Education Program, which provides college classes to incarcerated people in Connecticut and academic opportunities that help students learn about mass incarceration and refugee issues through field study, and granting students financial support for research, work, and internships outside the classroom.
“Having the resources to send students around the world to pursue internships and research projects has been a real game changer,” says Carbonetti.
Trinity also aims to connect students with experiential learning opportunities and internships at leading human rights organizations so they can get on-the-ground experience and a better understanding of how different communities experience human rights challenges, Carbonetti says. The program leverages its location in Hartford, which is brimming with human rights organizations and community groups, and collaborates with other institutions around the region to share resources and opportunities. Trinity also joined the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights Research, which allows the program to send students to a conference at Oxford University every summer. And the College offers a pair of experiential certificates in human rights, one focused on carceral systems and social change and the other a global migration and refugee resettlement lab.
Izabella Bautista ’26 says her experience outside the classroom has been some of the most valuable work she’s done at Trinity. Bautista, who wants to go into immigration law, interned with the Northwestern Prison Education Program, which provides a liberal arts education to incarcerated students in Illinois. She says she received vital support through the Human Rights Studies Program to be able to do this internship.
“Human rights studies helps us pop the bubbles that we’re living in,” she says. “It prepares us to better understand and weigh in on issues that are happening around the globe, in the United States, and right in Harford.”
Grant-Bolton also has seized many of the program’s opportunities to expand her education outside the classroom. She interned with a legal aid clinic and the Northwestern Prison Education Program, traveled to Louisiana to investigate environmental injustices in disadvantaged communities, and completed a research project analyzing the barriers to justice that women of color in Connecticut face when reentering society after incarceration.
“The Human Rights Studies Program connects us with experiences that collapse the space between the academic classroom and the many injustices and oppression happening in the world,” she says. “I’ve learned that the ideal engagement in the field of human rights requires both education and action, and that’s exactly what I’ve found at Trinity.”
Grant-Bolton says that while she was interested in a career focused on mass incarceration and the criminal justice system when she arrived at Trinity, she didn’t know what to pursue as her major. After she landed in a human rights advocacy class her first fall, she knew she’d found her academic home.
“That class introduced me to the really complex, challenging, and critical dialogues happening in the field of human rights, and I knew the program would equip me with the skills and knowledge to pursue social justice advocacy and reimagine the world’s most oppressive systems,” she says.
While many graduates of the Human Rights Studies Program go on to work at places such as the United Nations or various NGOs and nonprofits, Carbonetti stresses that he wants to empower students to approach any job as a human rights job—and to use their education as a critical lens to think about the world and how to make a positive impact.
“Students yearn for the chance to understand these big issues and find avenues for positive change,” he says. “A human rights education is it. That’s how we diagnose some of the hardest problems we face and figure out how to move forward.”
Header Image: Ben Carbonetti, director of the Human Rights Studies Program and senior lecturer in human rights studies (Photo: Nick Caito)
