Lecture – From Committing Violence to Remembering It: Research Departing from Dominant Interpretations
Central European University
Budapest Site
Nador u. 15
Room : 101
Monday, April 28, 2025, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Speaker
The Democracy in History workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute cordially invites you to a new session of the Jeno Szucs Lecture Series:
From Committing Violence to Remembering it: Research Departing from Dominant Interpretations
by Sinisa Malesevic and Lea David
in Budapest, Nador street 15., room 101, or on Zoom.
Registration is required for on-site as well as online participants, please register here. Zoom link will be sent to those who register.
Abstract:
The next installment of the Jenő Szucs Lecture Series will provide an insight into cutting-edge research regarding violence and moral remembrance, shedding light on new, more nuanced perspectives. In the first presentation, Prof. Sinisa Malesevic looks into violence, going against simplistic opposite explanations of how easy or hard it is committed on the battlefield. By explaining the context and complex emotions surrounding it, the presentation will give an insight into the internal dynamic of violence and its varying outcomes. In the second presentation, Dr. Lea David explores what comes after violence — remembrance. Treating moral remembrance in the context of human rights ideology, with its standardized and universalized forms of memorialization, the presentation would discuss its failure to overcome the violence and nationalism that it was supposed to extinguish.
Speakers:
Sinisa Malesevic is a Full Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at the University College, Dublin and a Senior Fellow at CNAM, Paris, France. He is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea. His recent books include Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2017) He is a recipient of several international book awards. Prof. Malesevic has also authored over 130 journal articles and book chapters and 9 edited volumes. His work has been translated into 14 languages.
Lea David is an Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin. Her work examines the globalization of human rights and memory politics, and their impact on nationalist ideologies in post and in-conflict settings. Her main research and teaching interests cover the interconnectedness of sociology of human rights and memory politics, nationalism and nation-state; human-object relations; ideology; solidarity; historical sociology; qualitative research methods; the Holocaust/Genocide nexus; the Balkan and the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. She has held various postdoc fellowships including a fellowship in Holocaust Studies, the Fulbright Fellowship, the prestigious Jonathan Shapira fellowship at Tel Aviv University, the Israeli Council fellowship for outstanding scholars, and a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the School of Sociology at UCD. Her book manuscript “The Past Can’t Heal Us! The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights” published with Cambridge University Press (2020) was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association best book award, and was awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2021 ASA Sociology of Human Rights Gordon Hirabayashi Award. Her second book ‘A Victim’s Shoe, a Broken Watch and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights’ is published in 2025 with Columbia University Press.
The CEU Democracy Institute’s Democracy in History Workgroup launched a public lecture series to bring together international as well as local scholars of history and related fields in Budapest as well as online to exchange their results on the interplay between democracy and histor(iograph)y in a broad sense. The series’ title honors the legacy of historian Jenő Szűcs, an advocate of recognizing Central Europe as a historical region and a major critic of the misuses of national past in his native Hungary.