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Professor of Modern History, University of Sydney

A. Dirk Moses is professor of modern history at the University of Sydney. Raised in Brisbane, Australia, he was educated at the Universities of Queensland (B.A. 1987), St. Andrews (M.Phil. 1990), Notre Dame (M.A. 1994), and California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 2000). Before coming to Sydney, he was a research fellow at the University of Freiburg, where he worked on postwar German debates about the recent past, a project that appeared as German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007), winner of the H-Soz-u-Kult ‘Historical Book of the Year’ prize for contemporary History. All the while, Dirk has pursued a parallel interest in genocide in colonial contexts, on which he has published many articles, book chapters, and edited books, including the prize-winning Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Berghahn 2008/pbk 2009), the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (2010 with Donald Bloxam), and Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (2014 with Bart Luttikhuis).

Between 2011 and 2015, Dirk was the professor of global and colonial history at the European University Institute, Florence. In 2010, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. for his project on the 'diplomacy of genocide', a study of genocide claims in postcolonial secessionist civil wars in the 1960s and early 1970s. For his critical intellectual history of the genocide concept, he spent 2008 as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and 2004/2005 as a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C.

Dirk has been senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011, and co-edits the series "War and Genocide" for Berghahn Books. He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals Patterns of Prejudice, Memory Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies, and of the international academic advisory boards of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies; the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, and UCD Centre for War Studies.

Experience

  • –present
    Profess of Modern History, University of Sydney

Education

  • 2000 
    University of California, Berkeley, USA, PhD