[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 57 (Tuesday, May 1, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E672]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR HELLE PORSDAM

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 1, 2001

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to a most 
talented and remarkable Danish scholar--Professor Helle Porsdam. 
Professor Porsdam is affiliated with the University of Southern 
Denmark, Odense and is a well known scholar and commentator on American 
society. Her most recent publication is Legally Speaking: Contemporary 
American Culture and the Law, which offers an insightful analysis of 
American culture and discusses the social impact of law in the United 
States.
  In addition to her outstanding scholarship, Dr. Porsdam is known for 
her involvement in human rights. She was instrumental in the creation 
of the European Master's Degree in Human Rights and Democratization in 
1997. Some 90 students from the 15 European Union partner universities 
earn this Masters degree after a year of intensive study.
  This summer, Dr. Porsdam will be one of the Danish Speakers at the 
Humanity in Action Program (HIA), which conducts two educational 
programs that run simultaneously in both Denmark and the Netherlands. 
Some 20 students from the United States participate together with 10 
students from both host countries. HIA has been established in 
association with Johns Hopkins University and in cooperation with the 
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The goal is to strengthen the 
participants' commitment to democratic values and broaden their 
knowledge of the resistance struggle against human rights violations 
today and in the past. A special focus of the program is the protection 
of European Jews during World War II.
  Mr. Speaker, Dr. Porsdam is an associate Professor of American 
Studies at Odense, and she holds an M.A. in English from the University 
of Copenhagen and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She 
teaches American history, and her research interests include American 
intellectual history, law and American culture, and literature. In 
1992-93 she was an American Council of Learned Societies Visiting 
Scholar and a Liberal Arts Fellow at the Harvard University Law School. 
She is currently involved in a research Project on Danish legalization 
as a form of Americanization. In this project Dr. Porsdam explains how 
the U.S. has exported a tendency to the rest of the world to define 
major issues in terms of rights.
  Dr. Porsdam is an extraordinary scholar and ardent defender of human 
rights and I urge all my colleagues to join me in paying tribute to her 
today.

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