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.
[3][4] He received his PhD at the University of Chicago under the direction of Neil Harris[citation needed].
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,[5] 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] In 2020, the University of Chicago Press published Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History, a book for which Cmiel had left behind an outline at the time of his death, and which his colleague and friend John Durham Peters finished.