Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann CM OOnt FRSC is a Canadian social scientist who specializes in international human rights.
Her mother (Mary Byrne) was Scottish, her father (Helmut Hassmann, later Michael Howard) was a refugee from Nazi Germany.
She was brought to Canada at a young age and attended public schools in Quebec and southern Ontario.
From 2003 to 2016, Dr. Howard-Hassmann held a Canada Research Chair in International Human Rights at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.
She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, South Africa in August 1992, and she was visiting scholar at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, University of Utrecht, from July through December 2000.
In 2013 she received the Sir John William Dawson Medal for Interdisciplinary Research from the Royal Society of Canada.
In 2010, as a Senior Editor of the Encyclopedia of Human Rights, Howard-Hassmann shared in the honour of receiving the Dartmouth Medal from the Reference and User Services Association.
From 1987 to 1992 Howard-Hassmann was co-editor and editor (in both English and French) of the Canadian Journal of African Studies.
She also posted scenarios on cultural relativism and human rights on her now-defunct Wilfrid Laurier University professor website for other scholars to use in teaching.