The International Chair for the History of the Second World War is organised by the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Université libre de Bruxelles to invite an internationally renowned historian each year. At the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg trial, the 2016 edition of the Chair revisits the issues of postwar trials and international justice in their widest chronological and geographical context. The chairholder is simultaneously awarded with the Baron Velge Prize, which honours Dr. Kerstin von Lingen (Universität Heidelberg) in 2016. She will give her inaugural lecture entitled "Making War Humane? An Intellectual History of the Concept of Crime Against Humanity, 1899-1945" on March 7, 2016, at Université libre de Bruxelles. A short lecture series will follow subsequently.
Dr. Kerstin von Lingen leads the junior research group "Transcultural Justice: Legal Flows and the Emergence of International Justice within the East Asian War Crimes Trials, 1945-1954" at the Cluster "Asia and Europe", examining the Soviet, Chinese, Dutch, and French war crimes trial policies in Asia. Her publications include two monographs "Kesselring's Last Battle: War Crimes Trials and Cold War Politics, 1945-1960" (University of Kansas Press, 2009) and "Allen Dulles, the OSS and Nazi War Criminals: The Dynamics of Selective Prosecution" (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as well as the edited volumes "Justice in Times of Turmoil: War Crimes Trials in the Wake of Decolonization" (forthcoming 2016), "Kriegserfahrung und nationale ldentität in Europa" [War experience and national identity in Europe after 1945], (Schoening, 2009), and coedited with Klaus Gestwa, "Zwangsarbeit als Kriegsressource in Europa und Asien" [Forced labor as a resource of War: European and Asian perspectives) (Schoening, 2014).
In the past years, the Baron Velge prize was awarded to Timothy Snyder (Yale University) in 2012, to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (University of California at Santa Barbara) in 2013, to Filippo Focardi (Università degli Studi di Padova) in 2014 and to Andrij Portnov (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) in 2015.
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