The Speakers

Roy Knocke

Lepsiushaus Potsdam

Fridtjof Nansen: The Plight of Statelessness as an International Challenge

Roy Knocke is the deputy director of the Potsdam Lepsius House and an associate lecturer at the University of Potsdam with focus on the history of genocide, history of humanitarianism and the moral history of extreme political violence in the 20th century. He obtained his doctorate with a work on moral and socio-philosophical aspects of genocide and published books on Franz Werfel and the Armenian Genocide and on the origins, manifestations and aftermath of political violence in the 20th century as co-editor and contributor.

Melanie Tanielian

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Violence, Aid, and Non-State Actors: Humanitarian Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Anatolia

Melanie S. Tanielian received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of WWI in the Middle East, the emergence of religious philanthropic societies and their work in times of conflict, the history of German missionaries, social Protestantism and modern humanitarianism, disease, medicine, and hospitals. Her monograph "The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid and World War I in the Middle East" tells how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how it sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities.

Charlie Laderman

King's College London

The Anglo-American Struggle to Save the Armenians and Remake Global Order

Charlie Laderman is a lecturer in international history at King's College London. He is author Sharing the Burden The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order" (Oxford University Press, 2019). Previously, he was Harrington Faculty Fellow at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and Clements Center for National Security, University of Texas, Austin Research Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, and an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on 19th and 20th century America and its relations with the wider world, with an emphasis on the intersection between U.S. and international history, the interconnection between U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics, and the relationship between imperialism, humanitarianism and liberal internationalism.

Yerevan State University

Vicken Cheterian

University of Geneva, Switzerland

War, Genocide, and "Remembering" in the Modern Middle East

Stefan Ihrig

University of Haifa

Hilmar Kaiser

Yerevan State University

The Armenian Origins of the Near East Relief

Vicken Cheterian is lecturer in history and international relations at the University of Geneva and at Webster University Geneva. He is the author of War and Peace in the Caucasus, Russia’s Troubled Frontier (2009), and his latest book is Open Wounds, Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide (2015).

Momme Schwarz

Saxonian Academy of Sciences, Leipzig

Stefan Ihrig

University of Haifa

Learning from the Turks - Interwar Germany, the Nazis and the Quest for Violent Solutions

Hülya Adak

Sabanci University/FU Berlin

Jewish Minority Protection during the Interwar Period - the Comité des délégations juives and the Schwarbard Trial

Momme Schwarz is a research Associate and PhD candidate, working on the project "Encyclopedia of Jewish Cultures" at the Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. His main areas of research are the history and influence of the Jewish labour movement and Jewish diplomatic history.

Fatma Müge Göçek

University of Michigan, Ann Abor

The Complexity of Denialism in Turkey in the Interwar Period

Born, raised and educated in Istanbul, Turkey, Fatma Müge Göçek is a Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the comparative analysis of history, politics, gender and collective violence. She has edited books on gender, nationalism, political caricatures, and contested spaces. Her sole-authored published works include "East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th Century "(Oxford University Press, 1987), "Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change" (Oxford University Press, 1996), "The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era" (I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), and "Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009" (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her last book won the American Sociological Association Culture Section and Comparative Historical Section awards. She is currently co-editing volumes on cultural violence and violence against the Kurds in Turkey today.

Edita Gzoyan

Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute

Violence against Women and Children in the Context of the Development of International Law

Dr. Edita Gzoyan is deputy scientific director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation since 2018. She received her Ph.D. in History at Yerevan State University in 2012 and an L.L.M. at American University of Armenia, also, in 2012. She is the author of nearly three dozen articles and a book. Dr. Gzoyan is Armenia country editor for Central and Eastern European Review.

Gerd Hankel

Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture (HSFWK)

The Relationship Between International Criminal Justice and Remembrance

Gerd Hankel is an International law expert and linguists at the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. He was a member of the team of the Wehrmacht exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht entitled „Dimensions of the War of Annihilation 1941-1944“. His book on Leipzig trials, i.e. the criminal prosecution of German war crimes in the First World War, is the standard work on these events. He is also a profound expert on the history of the Rwandan genocide, particularly on observing and evaluating the work of the so-called Gacaca courts and the remembrance culture in Rwanda today.

Ronald G. Suny

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, and Senior Researcher at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He was Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015 and director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies from 2009 to 2012. His research focuses on Russian, Armenian, and Caucasian history, the history of nationalism, empire, ethnic conflict and genocide. His major publications are: “ 'They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:'  A History of the Armenian Genocide" (Princeton University Press, 2015), "Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History" (Indiana University Press, 1993), "The Soviet Experiment:  Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States" (Oxford University Press, 1998) and as co-editor "A Question of Genocide:  Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire"(Oxford University Press, 2011)

Stefan Ihrig works on various aspects of European and Middle Eastern history with a special interest in transnational and entangled issues as well as in the history of discourses, perceptions, and political ideas. His most recent book is "Justifying Genocide – Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler"(Harvard University Press, 2016). His previous book, "Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination" (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014), received an official commendation in the 2013 Fraenkel Prize Competition of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide.

Chalak Kaveh

Volda University College

The Apex of European Traditional «Gypsy policy» in the Interwar Period – A History of Policy Radicalization

Chalak Kaveh is associate professor of history at Volda University College in Norway and holds a PhD from the University of Oslo («Vagrancy Plague»: The Treatment of Roma and Romani groups by the Norwegian Police and Judiciary 1900-1960, UiO 2016). Kaveh is the former editor of «Etter Lemkin», a journal of genocide studies. Kaveh´s research interests are Genocide Studies, Minority studies and Police History. Kaveh is currently working on a book on contemporary Kurdish politics.

Hülya Adak

Sabanci University/FU Berlin

Andrei N. Mandelstam and the History of Human Rights between the World Wars

Hülya Adak is Sabancı University Gender Director and visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin. She is currently working with the Free University's Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies on a close collaboration on gender studies in Turkey and Germany. Her research interests include gender and women's studies, sexuality, aesthetics and politics, European, Ottoman and Turkish literature, European and Turkish modern drama and film and trauma studies.

Michael B. Elm

Tel Aviv University/ Free University of Berlin

Remembering the Great War in the Middle East. Constructing Cultural Trauma in Aljazeera (English) Documentaries

Michael B. Elm studied sociology, political sciences and educational theory at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main Germany. He received his doctorate with a survey on the depiction of Holocaust testimonies in feature and documentary films and worked at the Fritz-Bauer-Institute on media and memory culture. From 2009 to 2014 he served as a long-term lecturer of the German Academic Exchange Service at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva in the departments of social and political sciences. Currently he is a senior research fellow at the Minerva Institute for German History (Tel Aviv University), Friedrich Meinecke Institute (Free University, Berlin) and teaches cultural memory studies in German and European Modernity at Haifa University. His upcoming book investigates the cinematic memory of the First World War in Europe and the Middle East.

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