Concentration Camps: A Global History

A lecture by Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London)

USC, Herklotz Room, Doheny Memorial Library (Music Library) 

Concentration camps are among the defining characteristics of the modern age, yet few historians have tried to analyse them outside of specific national contexts. In this talk Dan Stone asks how comparative and transnational approaches to concentration camps can help us to understand their emergence and spread around the world. He suggests that a historical analysis of this sort, when set alongside claims about the "meaning" of camps made by philosophers and sociologists, can provide a rounded account of the concentration camp phenomenon.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author or editor of fifteen books and some 70 scholarly articles, including: Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool University Press, 2002); Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010); Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014); and The Liberation of the Camps: The End and Aftermath of the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2015). He is currently completing a volume on concentration camps for OUP's "Very Short Introductions" series.

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP at cagr@usc.edu.