Holocaust Memorial Program

Speaker: Elizabeth Heineman

Professor Heineman’s talk at OSU will focus on international humanitarian law and human rights law regarding violence against women.  As she will note, sexual violence in settings of armed conflict may now be prosecuted as a grave violation of international humanitarian law, yet many states lack adequate frameworks to address “peacetime” issues covered under the human rights framework, such as intimate partner violence. She will explore the reasons for this disparity.

Elizabeth Heineman, chair of the Department of History at the University of Iowa, specializes in modern German and European history and in the history of women, gender, and sexuality. Her many publications include What Difference Does a Husband Make?: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany and Before Porn was Legal. She edited the highly acclaimed anthology, The History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones. Herself the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she is currently embarked on an ambitious project to examine the intrafamilial relationships of Jews leading toward the Holocaust and then after it, to see how family members responded to persecution and later to genocide.

This event is co-sponsored by the President's Commission on the Status of Women.