The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2016: Professor Cathie Carmichael

The Hugo Valentin Centre is very pleased to announce that Professor Cathie Carmichael of the University of East Anglia will be our 14th Hugo Valentin Lecturer. The title of her lecture is "Genocide Before the Holocaust". The event will take place on 11 April 2016 at Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala.

Professor Cathie Carmichael heads the School of History at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests primarily concern issues such as national identity, borders and violence especially in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean. She is the author and editor of several books including The Routledge History of Genocide (co-edited with Richard Maguire), Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition, Genocide before the Holocaust and A Concise History of Bosnia. She has also been a co-editor of the journals European History Quarterly, Europe-Asia Studies and History. Professor Carmichael is an editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2007.

The title of Professor Carmichael's lecture is "Genocide before the Holocaust" and it deals with the killing of Talât Paşa by the Armenian Sohomon Teillirian in 1921 and the murder of Symon Petliura, the Ukranian nationalist leader during the Russian civil war, at the hands of the Ukranian Jew Sholom Schwartzbard in 1927. During her talk, Professor Carmichael will show how these two cases influenced the thinking of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in the 1940s. She will also touch upon issues such as the relationship between the impartiality of law, individual liberty and violent political change.