Kenneth Cmiel

Kenneth J. Cmiel (August 31, 1954 - February 4, 2006) was an American academic and historian specializing in the history of human rights at the University of Iowa. He was a professor of history there, as well as the director of the university's Center for Human Rights.^[1]

He is the son of Henry and Jean (née Gasiorek) Cmiel. In 1980 he married Anne Duggan with whom he had three children. He died in 2006 from a previously-undiagnosed brain tumor.^[2][3]

He received his PhD at the University of Chicago under the direction of Neil Harris. He has published two books: Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), which won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians,^[4] and A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (1995). At the time of his death, he was in the process of writing a third book, to cover the origins of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.^[1]

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