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The Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize award honors Oliver W. Koonz, Prof. Claudia Koonz’s late father. The prize honors the best essay/paper or alternative project prepared by an undergraduate for the academic year. The Duke Human Rights Center@FHI awards one $500 prize to the winner or winners in each category.
This year's deadline is April 25, 2025
Please submit entries to rights@duke.edu
Submission Guidelines
GUIDELINES FOR ESSAY SUBMISSIONS
- Maximum length: 25 double-spaced pages excluding notes & bibliography
- Identification of the relevant human right(s) principles
- A clear topic sentence explaining the essay impact
- An explanation of the methods used and an evaluation of relevant research
- A conclusion – addressing the “so what” question
EXAMPLES OF PROJECTS: a photographic essay, a play script or short story, visualization of data, 15-20 min video, web page, an app, or other creative approach to confronting a human rights issue.
- Each submission should include a paragraph about the pertinent human right(s) issue discussed
- Each submission should have a title page. If created for a course, the submission should note the instructor, semester taken, and course name
- The project much be submitted while the author/creator is an enrolled student at Duke (the project may be submitted at any time during a student's time at Duke, including after the project was created).
2024 Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize Winners
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2024 Best Essay: Alexandra Bernstein-Naples
Alexandra Bernstein-Naples’s essay, “Reserving the Right to Deflection: A Quantitative Analysis of States Logging Reservations to the Genocide Convention,” is a rigorous, sophisticated, and quantitative analysis about a supremely important issue: the ways that states have expressed reservations to the Genocide Convention, sparing them the possibility of prosecution in the International Court of Justice. In an era of continued state repression, and headline-grabbing genocide investigations by the ICJ, this topic could not be more timely.
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2024 Best Essay: Madeleine McLean
Madeleine McLean provided a local study of race, journalism, and human rights in North Carolina in her essay, “Beyond the Headlines: How the North Carolina Black Press Advocated for Racial Equality in the Asylum Setting.” She studied the divergent interpretations that white and Black newspapers gave to a local mental health institution, showing that Black newspapers adopted a more critical perspective on the matter, tying their journalism to broader issues of human and civil rights. This focus on the press is crucial, too, given the many attacks on press freedom that we see around the world today.