New Books in Genocide Studies
by Marshall Poe
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
Episodes
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Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2026)
When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops held enormous moral sway. During the 1930s, many used their positions to forcefully condemn the rise of Nazism. But as...
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Art for War: Heritage Looting, Blood Antiquities, and the International Fight Against Terrorism Financing with Costanza Musu (Stanford UP, 2026)
Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site…
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Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality with Danny Orbach (Hurst, 2026)
Why was the Japanese Army so brutal before and during World War Two? This haunting question anchors a sweeping investigation into the moral universe of Imperial Japan’s soldiers, tracing their path from the twilight of the samurai age to the ashes of Manila in 1945. Punishment: Behind Japanese...
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Meghan Garrity, "Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass...
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Deborah Mayersen, "Genocide Prevention: An Evidence-Based Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
There has never been a more promising time for genocide prevention. More resources and research are being focused on prevention than ever before. Yet we still lack vital knowledge as to the most effective ways to stabilise and reduce the risk of genocide in current at-risk societies. Genocide...
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Daniel Byman, "American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Amidst heightened rhetoric and increasing polarization in the United States, American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America (Oxford University Press, 2026) chronicles the causes and consequences of two centuries of mob violence in American history, highlighting exactly what's at stake…
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Martin Shaw, "The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza" (Agenda Publishing, 2025)
The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza (Agenda...
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Sarah M. Cushman et al eds., "The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau" (Routledge, 2026)
The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Routledge, 2026) examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives consider Auschwitz’s history by engaging with Holocaust historiography and its place in Holocaust memory and...
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Delia Duong Ba Wendel, "Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty" (Duke UP, 2025)
In Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty (Duke UP, 2025), Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she...
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Rachel Deblinger, "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust" (Indiana UP, 2025)
How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records...
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Alice von Bieberstein, "Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines the political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide in present-day Turkey, focusing on the region of Muş (Moush). Anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein explores how the...
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Gideon Reuveni, "The Great Repair: Emotions, Memory, and the German–Jewish Settlement after the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2026)
The Great Repair: Emotions, Memory, and the German–Jewish Settlement after the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2026) explores how Jews and Germans began reparations discussions fewer than seven years after the Holocaust—a momentous achievement relegated to the margins of Holocaust scholarship and…
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Carol Rittner and John K Roth, "This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today" (iPub Cloud, 2026)
Written for educators, scholars, graduate students, and readers engaged in Holocaust education, genocide studies, history, ethics, religious studies, and political theory, This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today (iPub Cloud, 2026) treats teaching as a consequential act—one inseparable from the...
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Roundtable on Genocide Studies on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Genocide Studies International
2026 marks the 20th year of publishing Genocide Studies International. The journal's first issue was a special issue on genocide in Darfur. Twenty years later, newspapers and podcasts are talking again about mass violence in Sudan. So I thought it would be a good time to host a discussion among...
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Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union" (Stanford UP, 2026)
In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet...
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Susanne Vees-Gulani, 'Icon Dresden: Baroque City, Air War Symbol, Political Token" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
Icon Dresden: Baroque City, Air War Symbol, Political Token (University of Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Susanne Vees-Gulani explores how memory and politics in Dresden after its 1945 bombing are deeply intertwined with the city’s urban history. It highlights the complex origins of Dresden’s...
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Lorena Sekwan Fontaine and Adam Muller eds., "The Erasure and Revitalization of Indigenous Cultures and Languages" A Special Issue of Genocide Studies International" (Vol 16, No 2)
Lorena Sekwan Fontaine and Adam Muller, eds., The Erasure and Revitalization of Indigenous Cultures and Languages: A Special Issue of Genocide Studies International (Vol. 16., No. 2). A publication of the Zoryan Institute and University of Toronto Press. This special issue of Genocide Studies...
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The Shtetl: Myth and Reality with Samuel Kassow
Even those who do not know much Yiddish have probably heard the word “shtetl,” but what does that word mean exactly? Can we just say that it was a small town in Eastern Europe with a lot of Jews—and leave it at that? Or was the shtetl that nostalgic world of “tradition” so lovingly celebrated in...
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Cindy Schweich Handler, "A German Jew's Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany" (McFarland, 2025)
Cindy Schweich Handler’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Redbook, The Huffington Post, and a host of other national publications. She is a former editor and writer for the USA Today Network. A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification…
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Alex Alvarez and Richard R. Fernandez, "Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible (Bloomsbury, 2025) is an eye-opening book highlights the role of elites in constructing systems of persecution and extermination during the Holocaust. Being highly educated or living within a certain social class...
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Tom Menger, "The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
The violence of colonial wars between 1890 and 1914 is often thought to have been uniquely shaped by the nature of each of the European empires. The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues instead that...
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Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)
As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when…
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Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)
In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes…
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Jürgen Zimmerer, "Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness" (Reclam Verlag, 2023)
Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2023) is a new, provocative volume on German memory cultures and politics edited by Jürgen Zimmerer. What can be loosely translated as Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is a collection of chapters that lay...
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Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure...
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Martin Herskovitz, "Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor" (McFarland, 2025)
As a third generation Holocaust survivor, this was an important conversation with a second generation survivor. Marty has been conducting workshops on writing memory for quite a while and that's where we met - in his workshops with Jewish Ethiopians in Israel. Son of the Shoah: Poems from a...
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Anna Hájková, "People without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Queerness remains one of the most stigmatized and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (U Toronto Press, 2025) challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories...
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Mark Celinscak and Mehnaz Afridi, eds., "Global Approaches to the Holocaust: Memory, History and Representation" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)
The field of contemporary Holocaust studies is increasingly international in perspective. These approaches do not detach themselves from European history; rather, they incorporate perspectives and voices not always considered in more traditional Holocaust studies. The contributors to Global...
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Adam Jones, "Sites of Genocide" (Routledge, 2022)
Adam Jones will be familiar to anyone interested in the field of genocide studies. He's published one of the leading textbooks in the field. He's been influential in drawing attention to the intersection of gender and mass violence. And he's particpated in the emergence of attention to genocides…
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Radio ReOrient 13.4: “The Repression of the Uyghurs,” with Zumretay Arkin, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Marchella Ward
In this episode, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven were in conversation with Zumretay Arkin, discussing the Uyghur genocide in East Turkestan. Zumretay is Chair of the Women’s Committee at the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The WUC is an international organization acting as an umbrella organization...
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Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025)
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most storied events of the Holocaust, yet previous accounts of have almost entirely focused on its male participants. In The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising (Harper, 2025), Holocaust...
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Mark Mazower, "On Antisemitism: A Word in History" (Penguin Press, 2025)
What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s...
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Hamid Dabashi, "After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization" (Haymarket, 2025)
In this episode, we speak with Hamid Dabashi about his new book, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket, 2025), published by Haymarket Books. Written amid the ongoing war in Gaza, the book confronts what Dabashi describes as the moral and philosophical...
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Genocide Studies International Vol 16.1, Special Issue on The Future of Genocide Education
Why should we ask students to learn about genocides? What outcomes do we aim for from this learning? How successful are we being and how can we do better? And why, in the end, does it matter? These questions form the heart of a recent special edition of Genocide Studies International titled “The...
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Timothy Williams, "Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape" (Bristol UP, 2025)
Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape (Bristol UP, 2025) explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in post-violence Cambodia, Rwanda and Indonesia, the book...
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Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically…
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Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)
Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two...
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Aidan Forth, "Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
The concentration of terrorists, political suspects, ethnic minorities, prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and other potentially “dangerous” populations spans the modern era. From Konzentrationslager in colonial Africa to strategic villages in Southeast Asia, from slave plantations in America to...
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Ofer Ashkenazi and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, "Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While on sabbatical, in 2025-2026 he is the Mosse Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-author of the…
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Stanislav Kulchytsky, "The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor" (CIUS Press, 2018) - A Conversation with Bohdan Klid
The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor (CIUS Press, 2018) is a distillation of thirty years of study of the topic by one of Ukraine’s leading historians. In this account, Stanislav Kulchytsky ably incorporates a vast array of sources and literature that have become...
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Brendan Simms, "Hitler: A Global Biography" (Basic Books, 2019)
Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures. In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life,...
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Alexander Kimel and Martin Kimel, "The Pessimists Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025)
The Pessimists Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a personal depiction of life in Poland set against the Nazi and Soviet takeovers of Europe and their cataclysmic aftermaths. It is the compelling memoir of Alexander Kimel, taking him from a shtetl to a Nazi ghetto to...
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Adam A. Blackler, "An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)
At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into "exotic domains"...
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Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, "Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48" (Cambridge UP, 2014)
Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge UP, 2014) tells a story of Polish and Slovak Holocaust survivors returning to homes that no longer existed in the aftermath of the Second World War. It focuses on their daily efforts to rebuild their lives in the…
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Michael Geheran, "Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler" (Cornell UP, 2020)
What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness...
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Thomas Pegelow Kaplan ed. et al., "Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors' Voices and Their Future in Challenging Times" (Bloombury, 2025)
Close to a time when there will be no more survivors to speak about their suffering, this innovative study takes much-needed stock of the past, present and future of Holocaust testimony. Drawing from a vast range of witness accounts including a never-before-published survivor interview and...
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Klaus Bachmann, "The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore" (Routledge, 2025)
The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore (Routledge, 2025) combines social science concepts, history and transitional justice studies to examine the social dynamics, specific actors and ideologies involved in the genocide in Rwanda and examines...
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Anne Hand, "Austrian Again: Reclaiming a Lost Legacy" (Amsterdam Publishers, 2025)
Austrian Again: Reclaiming a Lost Legacy is a personal memoir that follows Anne Hand's emotional and bureaucratic journey to reclaim her Austrian citizenship—revoked from her ancestors during the Holocaust. As she digs into her family history, Anne uncovers stories of trauma, resilience, and…
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Frank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018)
When you mention Japanese War crimes in World War Two, you’ll often get different responses from different generations. The oldest among us will talk about the Bataan Death March. Younger people, coming of age in the 1990s, will mention the Rape of Nanking or the comfort women forced into service...
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Robert Hutchinson, "After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals" (Yale UP, 2022)
Robert Hutchinson's After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals (Yale UP, 2022) is about the fleeting nature of American punishment for German war criminals convicted at the twelve Nuremberg trials of 1946–1949. Because of repeated American grants of clemency and parole…
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About this show
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
Hosted by
Marshall Poe