Department of History

UCHI Dissertation Scholar David Evans will be giving a talk on “Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s”

with a response by Kathryn Angelica

This event will also be livestreamed.

“Rediscovering Hunger” examines the political struggle surrounding the effort to embed the human right to food into US foreign and domestic policy in the mid-1970s. Following a disastrous world food crisis that lasted from 1973-1974, US citizens and political leaders re-awoke to the ethical problem that hunger presented. The promise of the modernization projects of the 1960s gave way to a reality in which wealthy countries remained well-fed, the global poor starved and suffered. Therefore in 1976, various US Congressional leaders, supported by a broad coalition of religious and secular activists, sought to establish the human right to food in US policy. The effort represented one of the earliest efforts in a wider human rights project that came to dominate US politics by the end of the decade. The episode also illustrated the constraints of effectively achieving human rights, as food producers and market fundamentalists contested the meaning and viability of the human right to food despite its moral universality.

More details.

Please join the History Department faculty and graduate students for discussion of Amy Stanley’s (Northwestern) pre-circulated paper “Revisiting the “Comfort Girls” of Report 49: Race, Sex, and Documentation on the Battlefield in Burma, 1944.”

To receive a copy of the paper in advance of the event, please contact Prof. Emma Amador (emma.amador@uconn.edu).