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participants
From left to right: Mark Bradley, Samuel Moyn, A.W. Brian Simpson, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Daniel Cohen, Katrina Hagen, Wendy Perry, Peter Holquist, Lora Wildenthal (not pictured William Irvine).

Conferences

Writing the History of Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Europe: A Workshop for Historians

20-23 March, 2008
Rice University
Farnsworth Pavilion, Rice Memorial Center
Houston, Texas

This conference examines Imperial Russian and Soviet contributions to the law of war and the Nuremburg Trials, European perceptions of Armenians' fate in the Ottoman Empire, the politicization of human rights organizations in France, refugees and expellees in post-World War II Europe, and East and West German responses to decolonization.  At its conclusion, participants will discuss the promise and problems of creating historical narrative about human rights.  Co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Humanities and the Department of History.  Contact Lora Wildenthal at wildenth@rice.edu or Daniel Cohen at gdcohen@rice.edu.

All events take place in the Farnsworth Pavilion, Rice Student Center

Thursday, 20 March
Evening:  participants arrive in Houston

Friday, 21 March
9:00 a.m. Welcome

9:00 a.m. Panel I: Crimes against Humanity

  • Peter Holquist, Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. "From 'Crimes against Christianity to 'Crimes against Humanity': Imperial Russia's Role in Initiating the Drafting of the Allies' May 1915 Note on the Armenian Genocide"
  • Elizabeth Borgwardt, Associate Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis. "Crimes Against Humanity in History and Memory: The Nuremberg Trials"

12:00 a.m. Lunch

1:30 p.m. Panel II: Politics and a Human Rights NGO

  • William D. Irvine, Professor of History, York University. "The Politics of Human Rights: The Dilemma of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme"
  • Commentary, Wendy Perry, independent scholar

3:00 p.m. Break for the rest of the afternoon

6:00 p.m. Dinner

7:30 p.m. The 2008 Rorschach Lecture in Legal History

A.W. Brian Simpson, Professor of Law, University of Michigan. "The European Convention on Human Rights: The First Half-Century"


Saturday, 22 March

9:00 a.m. Panel III: Refugees, Expellees, and Cold War Politics

  • Daniel Cohen, Assistant Professor of History, Rice University. "The Figure of the Refugee and the Rise of Human Rights in the 1940s"
  • Lora Wildenthal, Associate Professor of History, Rice University. "From History to Legal Theory: Bringing the Human Rights of Germans into International Human Rights Debates"
  • Katrina Hagen, Ph.D. candidate, University of Washington. "The 'Free Angela Davis' Campaign: International Solidarity and Antiracism in the Cold War Germanys"

12:00 a.m. Lunch

1:30 p.m. Panel IV: Global Narratives of Human Rights

  • Jean Quataert, Professor of History, Birmingham University. "Between Morality and Sovereignity: Human Rights in Practice since 1945 "
  • Commentary, Mark P. Bradley, Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University.
  • Commentary, Samuel Moyn, Professor of History, Columbia University

6:00 p.m. Dinner TBA


Selected participants' publications

  • Anderson, Margaret. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton UP, 2000), and "Down in Turkey, Far Away': Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany," Journal of Modern History 79 (March 2007): 80-111.
  • Borgwardt, Elizabeth. A New Deal of the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005).
  • Bradley, Mark P. Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000) and co-editor Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001).
  • Cohen, Daniel. Refugee Nation: Forced Displacement and Humanitarianism in Postwar Europe. (Forthcoming? Manuscript?)
  • Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis: 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002).
  • Irvine, William D. Between Politics and Justice: the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1898-1945 (Stanford UP, 2006).
  • Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005), and A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2005).
  • Quataert, Jean. The Gendering of Human Rights in the International Systems of Law in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 2007).
  • Perry, Wendy. "Remembering Dreyfus: the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and the Making of the Modern French Human Rights Movement" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998).
  • Simpson, A.W. Brian. Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford UP, 2001), and In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Sponsors
Sincere thanks to the following for funding of this conference.
  • The Humanities Research Center, Rice University
  • The Dean of Humanities, Rice University, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities
  • The Department of History, Rice University

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