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RICHARD PIERRE CLAUDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2011

Bert Lockwood
Bert Lockwood
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati and Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights
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Extract

Richard Pierre Claude epitomized the scholar/activist. As a student at Florida State in 1960, he sat down with friends at a lunch counter in Tallahassee in violation of municipal law. He had a distinguished career at the University of Maryland. One of his proudest achievements was the founding of the Human Rights Quarterly, which he edited for four years. The impetus for founding HRQ was that the human rights field was dominated by lawyers, and while a number of social scientists were interested in doing scholarly work on human rights, the traditional journals were not receptive to this subject matter. Claude's vision for HRQ may be evidenced by the results from Project Muse, an electronic website administered by Johns Hopkins University Press. Of the 436 journals on Project Muse, Human Rights Quarterly ranked third in terms of downloads of articles in 2010, with 207,440.

Type
In Memoriam
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 674
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011

Richard Pierre Claude epitomized the scholar/activist. As a student at Florida State in 1960, he sat down with friends at a lunch counter in Tallahassee in violation of municipal law. He had a distinguished career at the University of Maryland. One of his proudest achievements was the founding of the Human Rights Quarterly, which he edited for four years. The impetus for founding HRQ was that the human rights field was dominated by lawyers, and while a number of social scientists were interested in doing scholarly work on human rights, the traditional journals were not receptive to this subject matter. Claude's vision for HRQ may be evidenced by the results from Project Muse, an electronic website administered by Johns Hopkins University Press. Of the 436 journals on Project Muse, Human Rights Quarterly ranked third in terms of downloads of articles in 2010, with 207,440.

Richard Claude coauthored with Burns Weston a leading coursebook in the human rights field, Human Rights in the World Community (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, 3rd ed). An area to which he devoted substantial attention was science and human rights, working particularly closely with the Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Claude was a cofounder of Physicians for Human Rights. At Princeton, he taught a course on science and human rights and published an award winning book on the subject in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights Series.

Richard was particularly proud of his work in human rights education. He presented workshops from Ethiopia to Burma and formulated a training manual used by the Inter-American Human Rights Institute, as well as a comparable “training for trainers” manual used in Asia from Indonesia to China. He passionately believed that education was the key to personal empowerment and essential to the enhancement of human dignity.

In recent years, he took up painting. Many scenes from his Georgetown neighborhood were featured, but true to Claude's heart, many of the works depicted articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Richard Pierre Claude will be deeply missed by his colleagues in the human rights field.