Academic Year 2017-18

Terror, Historical Memory, and the Myth of Religious Violence

Dr Roberto Sirvent (Hope International University)

Roberto Sirvent is Associate Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, California. He is the author of the book Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine (Pickwick Publications, 2015).  Roberto has broad interests in law and social movements, the ethics of patriotism, theories of resistance, prison abolition, and decolonial ethics. In his spare time Roberto enjoys watching Pixar films with his brilliant and beautiful wife Krista and playing hide-and-seek with his two nieces.

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Anatomy of a Genocide: The origins and everyday realities of local mass murder

Professor Omer Bartov (Brown University)

Co-hosted by UCD's Schools of Sociology and History, Omer Bartov presents a talk on the 'Anatomy of a Genocide: The origins and everyday realities of local mass murder'.

Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Omer Bartov's early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, ‘The Eastern Front, 1941-1945’, and ‘Hitler's Army’. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books ‘Murder in Our Midst', 'Mirrors of Destruction’, and ‘Germany's War and the Holocaust’.

For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacz—today part of Ukraine—was home to a highly diverse citizenry. It was here that Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews all lived side by side in relative harmony. Then came World War II, and three years later the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish residents. In truth, though, this genocide didn’t happen so quickly.

In ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, Omer Bartov explains that ethnic cleansing doesn’t occur as is so often portrayed in popular history, with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leader and the unleashing of military might. It begins in seeming peace, slowly and often unnoticed, the culmination of pent-up slights and grudges and indignities. The perpetrators aren’t just sociopathic soldiers. They are neighbors and friends and family. They are human beings, proud and angry and scared. They are also middle-aged men who come from elsewhere, often with their wives and children and parents, and settle into a life of bourgeois comfort peppered with bouts of mass murder: an island of normality floating on an ocean of blood.

Date: Wednesday 28th March

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Reading the Hague: Assigning Relevance to the Hague Conferences, 1899-1915

Dr Maartje Abbenhuis (University of Auckland)

Maartje Abbenhuis is a historian of neutrality and internationalism, particularly in Europe in the period 1815 - 1919. She has published a book on the maintenance of neutrality by the Netherlands in the First World War, entitled The Art of Staying Neutral. The Netherlands in the First World War, 1914 - 1918 (Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Her latest book, An Age of Neutrals. Great Power Politics 1815 - 1914 was released by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award.

At present she is working on the global history of the two Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, research for which she was awarded a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant. She is in the process of writing two books for Bloomsbury publishing: The Nineteenth-Century World. The First Age of Globalisation (with Gordon Morrell, forthcoming, 2019) and Global War, Global Catastrophe. Neutrals, Belligerents and the Transformation of the First World War (with Ismee Tames, forthcoming, 2020).

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss

Professor Yair Mintzker (Princeton University)

Yair Mintzker studies the history of early modern and modern Germany, with particular interest in the Sattelzeit (1750-1850).

Professor Mintzker is the author of The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012; paperback 2014), which tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified (open) places. His second book, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (New York: Princeton University Press, 2017), is a retelling of the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the notorious “Jew Süss.”

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Professor Mintzker received his M.A. in history cum laude magna from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009). He is the recipient of several prizes, including the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize (2010) and the Urban History Association best book prize (2014), as well as fellowships from the DAAD, the Whiting Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Japan, China and the contest for Muslim sympathy during the Sino-Japanese war

Professor Eunan O'Halpin (Trinity College Dublin)

Eunan O'Halpin is Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary Irish History, and Director of the Trinity Centre for Contemporary Irish History. He was previously Professor of Government at Dublin City University (1998-2000). Educated at UCD and Cambridge, where he researched the history of the interwar British Treasury, he has written widely on aspects of 20th Irish and British history and politics, his most recent monograph being 'Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War (Oxford, 2008).

His current research interests include Afghanistan and the belligerents during the Second World War, and fatalities during the Irish revolution, 1916-1921. He is a Member (2003) of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow (2003) of Trinity College Dublin. He is a member of the government's Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations (2012-), and of the Barristers Professional Standards Appeals Board Board (2012-). Professor O'Halpin has just completed research for a major study of The Dead of the Irish Revolution 1916-1921,and is preparing a number of articles on aspects of Afghan history during the Second World War.

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Dr Paolo Virtuani (University College Dublin)

Paolo Virtuani is a Medievalist from Milan, and is currently working as Occasional Lecturer in UCD. 

He was awarded a Ph.D, with a Thesis entitled "The Knights Hospitaller in Medieval Ireland, c.1169-1378" (2014), currently being prepared for publication with Boydell and Brewer. He has also published with Four Courts Press.

Today, he is going to pretend he is a modern historian...

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Churchill and the British Origins of the European Project

Dr Marco Duranti (University of Sydney)

Dr Marco Duranti is lecturer in Modern European and International History in University of Sydney. His research specialises in the origins of international law, norms, and organisations and has published widely on the history of human rights, European integration, and conservative internationalism. He is also director of the Nation Empire Globe Research Cluster.

His first book, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) explores the foundations – cultural, intellectual, and political – of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) across the first half of the 20th century and it investigates the involvement of British and French conservatives, among them Winston Churchill, in the ethical dimensions of the European project.

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Tim Snyder

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Professor Tim Snyder (Yale University)

Timothy Snyder is one of the leading American historians and public intellectuals, and enjoys perhaps greater prominence in Europe, the subject of most of his work. He is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. 

Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He speaks five and reads ten European languages.  Among his publications are six single-authored award-winning books, all of which have been translated: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998, second edition 2016); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); andBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). Bloodlands won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. It has been translated into thirty-three languages, was named to twelve book-of-the-year lists, and was a bestseller in six countries.  His most recent book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015) will appear in twenty-four foreign editions. It has been a bestseller in four countries and has received multiple distinctions including the award of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee. 

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Book Launch - Jennifer Wellington

Exhibiting War: the Great War, museums and memory in Britain, Canada and Australia

Professor Jay Winter (Yale) to launch Dr. Jennifer Wellington's book entitled Exhibiting War: the Great War, museums and memory in Britain, Canada and Australia.

What does it mean to display war? Examining a range of different exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia, Jennifer Wellington reveals complex imperial dynamics in the ways these countries developed diverging understandings of the First World War, despite their cultural, political and institutional similarities. While in Britain a popular narrative developed of the conflict as a tragic rupture with the past, Australia and Canada came to see it as engendering national birth through violence.

Narratives of the war's meaning were deliberately constructed by individuals and groups pursuing specific agendas: to win the war and immortalise it at the same time. Drawing on a range of documentary and visual material, this book analyses how narratives of mass violence changed over time. Emphasising the contingent development of national and imperial war museums, it illuminates the way they acted as spaces in which official, academic and popular representations of this violent past intersect.

Date: 18 October 2017

Time: 17:30

Venue: National University of Ireland, 49 Merrion Square, Dublin 2

Mahon Murphy

Der Krieg ist Kein Afternoon tea! The Internment of German Colonial Settlers during the First World War

Dr Mahon Murphy (Kyoto University)

Mahon Murphy works on the history of empires in transition during war. His PhD thesis, received from the London School of Economics in 2015, focused on the British takeover of Germany’s colonies during the First World War and the treatment of German civilian internees and prisoners of war in the extra-European theatres of the conflict.

His research interests focus on the First World War as a global war, internment, the notion of imperial prestige and imperial interaction. He has also taught and lectured on various aspects of European and extra-European history of the early twentieth century.

Time: 16:30

Venue: School of History, Room K115

Dublin Festival of History 2017

To Hell and Back Europe, 1914 - 1949

Sir Ian Kershaw (Sheffield University) & Professor Robert Gerwarth (UCD Centre for War Studies)

Sir Ian Kershaw, one of Britain’s most distinguished historians and author of the magisterial biography of Hitler, will speak about his most recent book, To Hell and Back Europe, 1914-1949 with Professor Robert Gerwarth acting as chair.

Free admission and no booking required. (opens in a new window)Click here for more information.

Date: 1 October 2017

Time: 19:00

Venue: Printworks, Dublin Castle