Kenneth J. Cmiel (1955–2006)

Kenneth CmielKenneth J. Cmiel, 51, Professor of History and American Studies and Director of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, died suddenly Saturday, February 4, 2006, at University Hospitals from an undetected brain tumor.

Ken joined the UI faculty in 1987, after earning his PhD at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research interests were unusually wide-ranging, including the history of political thought, the history of mass communication, and popular culture in the US, as well as the global history of human rights. At the time of his death, he was working on a history of the idea of human rights, a topic on which he had recently published in scholarly journals. His first book, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. His second book, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare, was published in 1995.

In February 2005, Ken was honored with the invitation to deliver the University’s annual Presidential Lecture. The subject of his lecture was “Seeing War at a Distance: Photography from Antietam to Abu Ghraib." Ken had won the University’s major research awards, having been selected as a Faculty Scholar for 1994 to 1997 and as a Global Scholar for 2004 to 2006.

Ken was a popular and respected teacher and a generous and beloved colleague. He chaired the Department of History from 2000 to 2003 and served on the CLAS Educational Policy Committee from 1994 to 1997. As director of the Center for Human Rights since 2004, he was responsible for fostering collaborative research, teaching, and community outreach advocating for global human rights.