Fabian Klose
Leibniz Insitute of European History, Mainz
Follow on Twitter @FabianMKlose

Cross-posted from Humanitarianism & Human Rights

In about four weeks the first Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA) will meet for one week of academic training at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz before continuing with archival research at the ICRC Archives in Geneva.The Research Academy addresses early career researchers who are working in the related fields of humanitarianism, international humanitarian law, peace and conflict studies as well as human rights covering the period from the 18^th to the 20^th century. It supports scholarship on the ideas and practices of humanitarianism in the context of international, imperial and global history thus advancing our understanding of global governance in humanitarian crises of the present.

The GHRA received a huge amount of applications from an extremely talented group of scholars from more than fifteen different countries around the world. The selection committee considered each proposal very carefully and has selected these 12 participants for the GHRA 2015:

Cédric Cotter studied history and philosophy at the University of Geneva. Since 2012, he has been research associate and PhD student in a Sinergia project on Switzerland during the First World War involving the Universities of Zurich, Lucern, Bern and Geneva.

Sonya de Laat is a visual artist and PhD candidate in Media Studies at Western University in London, ON, Canada. She is interested in tracing the ethics and politics of humanitarian aesthetics from archival photographs while focusing on ways in which photography can respond to contemporary social injustices.

Brian Drohan is currently assigned as an instructor in the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy West Point. He is also completing his Ph.D. in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he researches human rights activism during post-1945 British counterinsurgency wars.

Jaclyn Granick recently defended her doctoral thesis, “Humanitarian Responses to Jewish Suffering Abroad by American Jewish Organizations, 1914-1929,” at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Her research interests include interactions among transnational non-governmental organizations, states, and international organizations; religious internationalism; history and historiography of Jewish philanthropy.

Natalia Jevglevskaja is a PhD student at the Melbourne Law School. Her thesis is focused on the duty of States Parties to the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions to conduct legal reviews of weapons under Article 36 of the Protocol.

Patrick William Kelly received his Ph.D. in history in 2015 from the University of Chicago. His research interests include twentieth-century international history, the history of the United States in the world, modern Latin American history, the global Cold War, and the global histories of human rights and humanitarianism.

Peter Ridder is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Cologne. Since 2013 he is holder of a Ph.D. scholarship from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and is working on his dissertation project “Human Rights in Competition: The Struggle Over Human Rights in the United Nations from 1966-1993”.

Jennifer Rodgers received her PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 with the dissertation “From the “Archive of Horrors” to the “Shop Window of Democracy”: The International Tracing Service 1942-2013.” She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung. Her current projects examine the politics of humanitarianism and cultural heritage.

Tehila Sasson is a PhD candidate at University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the imperial and global dimensions of modern European history, particularly of Britain. She is currently working on a book project, which examines how Britons, and to a large extent a burgeoning international community, came to act in the name of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century.

Sander Tetteroo is a PhD candidate as part of a joint program between Leiden University (Netherlands) and Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia). His research project is titled “Humanitarianism and Religion: Philanthropy in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia in Response to Calamities (c. 1890-1965)”. His research interests are in the histories of poverty, famine and disaster, humanitarianism and victimhood and colonial policy-making.

Boyd van Dijk completed his MA in Modern European History at Columbia University in 2013. He is currently a PhD student at the European University Institute (EUI), in Florence, where he works on the international history of the laws of war.

Mie Vestergaard is researcher at International Development Studies at the Department of Society and Globalization,Roskilde University (2013-2016). She is currently working on her PhD project “Humanitarian Categorization of Victimhood – The Case of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ engagement in the Nigeria-Biafra conflict 1967-70”.