The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2016: Professor Cathie Carmichael

The fourteenth Hugo Valentin Lecture was given by Professor Cathie Carmichael of the University of East Anglia.

Professor 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.

The title of Professor Carmichael's lecture was Genocide before the Holocaust and it dealt with the killing of Talât Paşa by the Armenian Sohomon Teillirian in 1921 and the murder of Symon Petliura. During her talk, Professor Carmichael showed 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.