What was your journey in academia and research like?

My research starts from my law practice. I was a practitioner, a human rights lawyer in Israel and Palestine. When I started practicing in military courts in the West Bank it wasn’t like anything I knew before. 

When I pursued my master’s in international human rights law, I realized that we weren't as special as I thought we were. I realized there is this role for military courts and tribunals in cases of conflict that I needed to look deeper into. From there, I developed my broader comparative and global perspective. 

I didn't think at the start that I would become a researcher and earn a PhD. I was very into my practice as a lawyer, and I did that for quite a long time. But I was left with so many unanswered questions that I wanted to explore. Additionally, I was always more intellectually curious than my work demanded. I always wrote too much for each of my cases and did too much research, and it wasn't efficient or useful, and certainly not profitable. 

I realized that I have other interests that I want to pursue and gain a broader perspective. My practice brought up so many questions that I didn't have an answer to, and those were things that I never studied in law school or anywhere else. Along with some burn out from the practice, that all brought me to my research and academic career.

Why do you emphasize interdisciplinarity and experiential learning in your classes?

It's important to involve students and their own lived experiences because I want them to be reflective and to think critically, also about their own culture and about their close environment in the same terms that they think about other places. 

In the course International Human Rights, I tell my students that we're trying to make the strange familiar and make the familiar strange. We want to apply the same analytical tools and the same critical thinking to what we are doing here and to what others are doing in other places, because we are part of the global world. We're not just outside of it and looking at it. Human rights issues and challenges are everywhere, including right around us. 

Very few people will actually become human rights professionals, many more become active in their communities, but by learning about it, they can gain a really important perspective about their own lives and the world around them. They can integrate a human rights perspective in whatever professional and personal path they choose, even if they become educators, medical professionals, computer engineers, or do business. 

It's really important for students to experience things and not only think about them theoretically or in an abstract way. It's just a totally different way of understanding and it's not easy to incorporate into classes, especially not into the large classes that we have, where I include films and interactive assignments.

Why University of Oregon?

It's very natural for me to be in the School of Global Studies and Languages because I am interested in global and comparative perspectives, in global justice issues. I found this school and university to be so friendly, so energized, and the people so fascinating with common interests, values, and vision, and I was very happy to join. 

At the same time, it was not so different from where I was before, at University of Washington. I felt I could connect easily with students in the Pacific Northwest environment.

—Grace Connolly, College of Arts and Sciences