Participant Bios
Taner Akçam
Armenian-Turkish Protocol and Dispute on an Historians Commission
Lessons Learned: Perspectives on the Proposed Armenia-Turkey Commission, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 11:30 – 1:15
Taner Akçam is the holder of Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University. He earned his doctorate from the University of Hannover. He serves on the editorial board of Genocide Studies & Prevention, the official journal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
His publications include: The Armenian Question and Turkish National Identity (1992); From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (2004); A Shameful Act: the Armenian Genocide and Turkish Responsibility (2006, 2007 Minnesota Book Award for general nonfiction); The Armenian Issue is Resolved: Policies Towards Armenians During the War Years, Based on Ottoman Documents (2008); and The Protocols of the Istanbul Military Tribunals on the Investigation of the Armenian Genocide (2009).
Charles Armstrong
Truth and Reconciliation within Korea: “Collaboration” and Colonialism
North East Asia: Varieties of Denial and Recognition, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 9:15 – 11:15
Charles K. Armstrong is The Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong has published several books on contemporary Korea, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007), The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, second edition 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. His current book projects include a study of North Korean foreign relations in the Cold War era and a history of modern East Asia. Professor Armstrong is a frequent commentator in the US and international media on Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs. Professor Armstrong teaches courses on modern Korean history, the international history of East Asia, the Vietnam War, and US-East Asian relations, among others. He received his BA from Yale, MA from the London School of Economics, and PhD from the University of Chicago. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1996.
Paige Arthur
Chair, Present and Absent Victims: The Baltic States and Romania , Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:45 – 3:45
Paige Arthur is the deputy director of institutional development at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and leads ICTJ’s initiatives in evaluating its impact, improving the effectiveness of its work, and knowledge management. From 2006 to 2009, she was Deputy Director of ICTJ’s Research Unit. Before coming to ICTJ, she was an editor of the journal Ethics & International Affairs, published by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. She was also the Senior Program Officer for the Ethics in a Violent World initiative at the Carnegie Council. She holds a PhD in European history, focusing on European decolonization, from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University. Her work has been published in the Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Theory & Society, and Ethics & International Affairs. She is the author of Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (Verso Books, 2010), and the editor of Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010).
Elazar Barkan
Chair, Lessons Learned: Perspectives on the Proposed Armenia-Turkey Commission, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 11:30 – 1:15
Elazar Barkan is the director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights, a professor of international and public affairs, and the director of the Human Rights Concentration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Previously, Professor Barkan served as chair of the History Department and the Cultural Studies Department at the Claremont Graduate University, where he was the founding director of the Humanities Center. He also founded the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) in The Hague.
Professor Barkan is a historian by training and received his PhD from Brandeis University. His research interests focus on human rights and on the role of history in contemporary society and politics and the response to gross historical crimes and injustices. His recent books include The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (W.W. Norton, 2000); Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity, (an edited volume with Ronald Bush, Getty, 2003); and Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (an edited volume with Alexander Karn, Stanford University Press, 2006).
Welcoming Remarks, Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:00 – 10:30
Omer Bartov
Crimes of the Wehrmacht and the Galician Mystery: Commissions and Obfuscations
Germany: After Guilt, Friday, March 12, 2010, 4:00 – 6:00
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He received his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1983 and has been a research fellow at Harvard, Princeton, and the Berlin American Academy. He has received National Endowment for Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include The Eastern Front 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Macmillan 1985); Hitler’s Army (Oxford UP,1991); Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford UP, 1996); Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford UP, 2000); Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Cornell UP, 2003), The “Jew” in Cinema (Indiana UP, 2005), and Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton UP, 2007). He is currently writing on inter-ethnic relations in Eastern Galicia.
Carol Gluck
Why Commissions Fail: China and Japan, 2010
North East Asia: Varieties of Denial and Recognition, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 9:15 – 11:15
Carol Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in modern Japan, from the late nineteenth century to the present, international relations, and history-writing and public memory in Asia and the West. Her publications include Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton 1987); Showa: the Japan of Hirohito (Norton 1992); Asia in Western and World History, co-edited with Ainslee Embree (Sharpe 1997); Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History (University of California, 2008; Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), as well as several books in Japanese, the most recent of which is Rekishi de kangaeru [Thinking with History] (Iwanami, 2007). She received her BA from Wellesley in 1962 and her PhD from Columbia in 1977.
Constantin Goschler
Money, Memory, and Bureaucracy: The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future”
Germany: After Guilt, Friday, March 12, 2010, 4:00 – 6:00
Constantin Goschler has been professor of modern history at the Ruhr-University Bochum since 2006. He is also the chair of the Institute of Contemporary History. His recent publications include: Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe, ed. together with Martin Dean and Philipp Ther. (Berghahn, 2007); Schuld und Schulden. Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945. [Debt and Debt: The Politics of Restitution for Victims of Nazi Persecution since 1945]. (Wallstein, 2005); and Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung: Geschichte, Erfahrung und Wirkung in Deutschland und Israel [The Practice of Restitution: History, Experience, and Impact in Germany and Israel], ed. together with Norbert Frei and Jose Brunner (Wallstein, 2009).
Yaroslav Hrytsak
The Longest Reconciliation: Polish and Ukrainian Memories on Polish-Ukrainian Military Conflicts in the 20th Century
Ukrainian and Polish Historical Commissions, Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:30 – 12:30
Yaroslav Hrytsak is a professor of history and the director of the Peter Jacyk Program for Studies of Modern Ukrainian History and Society (University of Alberta - Ivan Franko Lviv National University - Ukrainian Catholic University). He obtained his Ph.D. in history from Lviv University in 1987 and his habilitation from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1996. He has taught at Columbia University (1994, 2004), Harvard University (2000-2001), and the Central European University in Budapest (1996-2009). Dr. Hrytsak’s research focuses on the history of Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of numerous publications, including Narysy istortiji Ukrainy: Formuvannia Modernoji Ukrajinskoji Natsiji [Essays in Ukrainian History: the Making of a Modern Ukrainian Nation] (Kyiv, 1996 in Ukrainian; Polish translation in 2000), which received the Przeglad Wschodni award for the best foreign book on East European history in 1998. He also wrote Prorok u svoyiy vitchyzni: Ivan Franko i yoho spil’nota [Prophet in his Fatherland: Ivan Franko and His Community] (Krytyka, 2006), which was awarded the Antonovych Prize and the “Best Book in Ukraine” from the leading Ukrainian magazine Кореспондент [Correspondent].
Daniel Levy
Chair, Germany: After Guilt, Friday, March 12, 2010, 4:00 – 6:00
Daniel Levy is associate professor in the department of sociology at Stony Brook University in New York. As a political sociologist he is interested in issues of globalization, collective memory studies and comparative-historical sociology. Among his books related to memory studies are: The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Temple University Press 2006) and Memory and Human Rights (Penn State University Press 2010), both with Natan Sznaider. Forthcoming is The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press - with Jeffrey Olick and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi). In 2009 he co-founded the Columbia University Seminar on History, Redress and Reconciliation, which he is co-chairing with Elazar Barkan.
John Micgiel
Chair, Ukrainian and Polish Historical Commissions, Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:30 – 12:30
John Micgiel is an adjunct associate professor of international and public affairs, an associate director of Harriman Institute, director of East Central European Center, and executive director of the European Institute. His teaching and research interests include modern history of East Central Europe (ECE), contemporary politics in ECE, and Western Europe. He has authored Coercion and the Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1944–1947 (forthcoming); In the Shadow of the Second Republic; Polish Foreign Policy Reconsidered: Challenges of Independence; and Frenzy and Ferocity: The Stalinist Judicial System in Poland, 1944–1947, and the Search for Redress (The Carl Beck Papers). He has been the editor for Wilsonian East Central Europe, Perspectives on Political and Economic Transitions After Communism, State and Nation Building in East Central Europe: Contemporary Perspectives, and coeditor for Poles and Jews: Myth and Reality in the Historical Context. Micgiel holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1975). He received an MIA and a Certificate of the Institute on East Central Europe from Columbia (1977), followed by a PhD in 1992.
Norman M. Naimark
Germans, Poles, and the Controversy about the “Museum Against ‘Vertreibung’”
Germany: After Guilt, Friday, March 12, 2010, 4:00 – 6:00
Naimark M. Naimark was educated at Stanford University, where he received his BA (1966), MA (1968), and PhD. For sixteen years he was professor of history at Boston University and fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. He has been in the history department at Stanford University since 1988 and holds the Robert and Florence McDonnell Chair in East European History. He is also fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of a number of books including The Russians in Germany (Harvard, 1995) and Fires of Hatred (Harvard, 2001).
Soon-Won Park
A History That Opens to the Future: The First Common China-Japan-Korean History Teaching Guide
North East Asia: Varieties of Denial and Recognition, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 9:15 – 11:15
Soon Won Parkis teaches modern Korean and East Asian history in the department of history and art history at George Mason University, Washington, DC. As a historian specializing in colonial Korea, she has been teaching modern Korean history and East Asian history courses in various campuses in Seoul, Tokyo, and the Washington, DC area, including University of Maryland-College Park, Howard University, Yonsei University, and Keio University. She holds a B.A. from the Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern Korean History (1985) from Harvard University. She is the author of Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999) and “Beneath the Colonial Industrial Growth: Urbanization of Korean Labor,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, Shin Gi-Wook and Michael Robinson, eds. (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999). She also co-edited Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia: The Korean Experience (Routledge, 2006). Other various articles include “Colonial Inventions: Korean Art Histories Written by Japanese Scholars,” “Making of the Colonial Policies in Korea: The Factory Law Debate,” and “The Korean Workers during WWII.” Currently, her research interest goes to the themes of the politics of remembrance in contemporary South Korea and the socio-cultural aspect of colonial modernity in interwar Korea focusing on the year 1929.
Krzysztof Persak
Institute of National Remembrance: Polish Model of Dealing with the Totalitarian Past
Ukrainian and Polish Historical Commissions, Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:30 – 12:30
Krzysztof Persak is a research fellow at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science and senior expert at the Public Education Office of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. He is also visiting professor of contemporary history at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. In 1999, Dr. Persak was visiting fellow at the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C. He also served as consultant for the Hoover Institution Archives and research associate of the NATO–Warsaw Pact Parallel History Project. Dr Persak’s research area is contemporary political and social history of Poland, with special focus on Polish-Soviet relations, the communist power system, and the activities of the communist security police, as well as Polish-Jewish relations. His major publications include: Odrodzenie harcerstwa w 1956 roku [Rebirth of Scouting Movement in Poland in 1956] (Warsaw, 1996); Wokol Jedwabnego [Around Jedwabne – A two-volume study of a massacre of Jewish inhabitants in north-eastern Poland, carried out by Polish peasants and Nazi Security Police in July 1941] (Warsaw, 2002– jointly with Pawel Machcewicz]; A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944-1989 (Warsaw, 2005 – jointly with Lukasz Kaminski); Sprawa Henryka Hollanda [Henryk Holland Affair – an investigative study into the mysterious death of a known journalist during a search conducted in his apartment by the communist Security Service in 1961] (Warsaw, 2006). The latter book won the Polityka weekly historical award, the most prestigious Polish award for books on 20th century history.
Eva-Clarita Pettai
Aufarbeitung of the Holocaust in the Baltic States: Comparing Baltic History Commissions’ Impact on Jewish-Baltic Reconciliation
Present and Absent Victims: The Baltic States and Romania , Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:45 – 3:45
Eva-Clarita Pettai, PhD, is academic coordinator and researcher at the Center for the Study of Democracy (ZDEMO), University of Lüneburg, Germany. Previously, she worked for several years as senior researcher at the Institute of Government and Politics, University of Tartu, Estonia. She is author of Democratizing History in Latvia (Krämer, 2003, in German) as well as of numerous publications on history and memory politics in the Baltic states. Her research interests include theories of history and collective memory, Baltic historiography as well as memory politics in post-enlargement Europe.
Vello Pettai
The Baltic States and Russia: Bilateral Lessons from Unilateral Commissions
Present and Absent Victims: The Baltic States and Romania , Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:45 – 3:45
Vello Pettai is currently guest professor at the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. He also holds an appointment as senior researcher at the Institute of Government and Politics at the University of Tartu, Estonia, where he has worked since 1995. Vello Pettai received his MA and PhD in political science from Columbia University (2004) and did undergraduate work in Russian and political science at Middlebury College (1989). His research interests are in democratic transition, ethnopolitics and post-communist party development. He recently completed (with Eva-Clarita Pettai) a major report for the European Commission on policies of transitional justice and historical remembrance in Estonia. He will also have two entries on Estonia in the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010.
David L. Phillips
Lessons from the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission and Their Applicability to the Protocols on Normalization and Recognition
Lessons Learned: Perspectives on the Proposed Armenia-Turkey Commission, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 11:30 – 1:15
David L. Phillips is director of the Program on Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at American University in Washington, DC. He is also a research scholar at Columbia’s Center for Study of Human Rights and adjunct associate professor at NYU’s Graduate School of Politics. Phillips has worked as a senior adviser to the United Nations Secretariat and as a foreign affairs expert and senior adviser to the U.S. Department of State. He has held positions as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies, executive director of Columbia University’s International Conflict Resolution Program, and as a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He has also been a senior fellow and deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action, director of the European Centre for Common Ground, project director at the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo, president of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation. Mr. Phillips is author of From Bullets to Ballots: Violent Muslim Movements in Transition (Transaction Press, 2008), Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Perseus Books, 2005), Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation (Berghahn Books, 2005), which recounts his work as chairman of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission. He has also authored many policy reports, as well as more than 100 articles in leading publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Affairs.
Lavinia Stan
The Wiesel and Tismaneanu Commission: Lessons for Turkish-Armenian Historical Commissions
Present and Absent Victims: The Baltic States and Romania , Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:45 – 3:45
Lavinia Stan is an associate professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University (Canada), a member of the Club of Rome, and a former expert with the Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security of the European Commission. She has researched and published extensively on transitional justice, Eastern European politics, and religion and politics. She is the editor of Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoning with the Communist Past (Routledge 2009), the co-author of Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Romania (Oxford University Press, 2007), and the author of articles published in the European Journal of Political Research, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Societies, Communist and Post-Communist Politics, and East European Constitutional Review. Since 2009, she has served as editor for Europe for the peer-reviewed Women’s Studies International Forum (Elsevier).
Frank E. Sysyn
Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation: Traditional Views and the Roots of Reconciliation from World War II to the Late 1980s
Ukrainian and Polish Historical Commissions, Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:30 – 12:30
Frank E. Sysyn is the director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, and editor in chief of Hrushevsky Translation Project. A specialist in Ukrainian and Polish history, he is the author of Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600-1653 (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute,1985); Mykhailo Hrushevsky: Historian and National Awakener (Heritage Press2001), and studies on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Ukrainian historiography, and early modern Ukrainian political culture. He is also co-author, with Serhii Plokhy, of Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003). Dr. Sysyn serves on the editorial boards of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, and the Journal of Ukrainian Studies.
Q. Edward Wang
Remembrance, Reconciliation and Reconstruction – China-Japan Joint History Research Project: Problems and Prospect
North East Asia: Varieties of Denial and Recognition, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 9:15 – 11:15
Born and raised in Shanghai, China, Q. Edward Wang received his education partly in China and partly in the US. He is now professor of history at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey and Changjiang Visiting Professor at Peking University. He is also editor of Chinese Studies in History (M.E. Sharpe) and secretary general of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography. His publications include Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (State University of New York Press, 2001) and A Global History of Modern Historiography (coauthored, Pearson Longman, 2008).
