|
Kenneth Cmiel, who died suddenly on Feb. 4, received a posthumous Regents Award for Faculty Excellence. A professor of history and American studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the UI Center for Human Rights, Cmiel was an influential and creative scholar with a range of intellectual interests. In recent years, he had published groundbreaking research on the history of human rights, and he shared some of those insights as the UI's 2005 Presidential Lecturer. He was a popular teacher and mentor to undergraduate and graduate students alike, and to students from a variety of fields besides history. A member of the UI faculty since 1987, Cmiel served as chair of the Department of History for three years before becoming director of the UI Center for Human Rights. In that role, he collaborated with faculty to create new human rights-centered courses, established new graduate and undergraduate internship programs and devoted months of work to co-authoring a major Department of Education grant proposal to fund a variety of university-wide initiatives with a human rights focus. He was widely known as a generous and exemplary university citizen. The $1,000 associated with Cmiel's award will go to the Center for Human Rights internship program. |
