The award, which Schoepfel received on December 14, honored her dissertation “War crimes and decolonization in the courtroom: France at the Tokyo and Saigon Trials.” She conducted her research under the supervision of PD Dr. Kerstin von Lingen and Prof. Madeleine Herren. Using innovative primary sources, she demonstrated the impact of colonial law on international law by evaluating the French war crimes trials policy in Indochina in the wake of World War II.
Every year since 1996, the French Institute of Contemporary International Relations has rewarded the best research in history of international relations by offering two prizes – one to the author of the best dissertation, the other to the author of the best Master’s thesis.
Ann-Sophie Schoepfel was a Graduate Student in Transcultural Studies and conducted her Ph.D. project within the Junior Research Group A16 Transcultural Justice at the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context." She defended her PhD in July 2018. From 2013 to 2014, she was affiliated with Sciences Po Paris, the United States Holocaust Memorial and the University of Kyoto. In October 2018 she joined the group “Reconstructing memory in the city”, led by Jan and Aleida Assmann at the University of Konstanz. She is now working for the Balzan Prize on the emergence of transnational sites of memories of the Vietnamese migration in Europe.