Professional Affiliation

Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Expert Bio

Francine Hirsch is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on Soviet and Modern European history and on the history of human rights. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 1998. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005) received several awards, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. She has just launched a new project on the history of Russian-American entanglement.

Wilson Center Project

The Soviets at Nuremburg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order

Project Summary

The project examines the role of Soviet legal experts in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 and in the subsequent development of an international discourse on human rights. It also investigates the role of Nuremberg in the Soviet imagination- focusing on the Soviet writers, artists and the like who attended the trials and brought them to the Soviet population back home.

Major Publications

Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, Oxford University Press, July, 2020.