Research Fields
- Modern Central European History
- Compensation and Reparations (Wiedergutmachung)
- Habsburg Monarchy
- Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict
- Political Theory
- Law and Minority Rights
About
Dr. Iris Nachum is a historian of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on Austria and the Bohemian lands, with a special interest in compensation and restitution; liberalism and nationalism; ethnic conflict and expulsion.
In her studies, she focuses on the rise of German nationalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, the intriguing interplay between liberalism, nationalism, and Nazism, and the post-1945 expulsion of ethnic German peoples from Central and Eastern Europe to Germany and Austria. Most of her research and publications explore the complex interactions between demands, practices, and discourses of compensation (Wiedergutmachung) in the intra-German, German-Israeli, and German-Jewish contexts.
Since 2020, she serves as a Senior Lecturer at the History Department and as Deputy Director of the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Selected Publications
Iris Nachum. 2022. “Coming To Terms With The Nazi Past'?: The West German Compensation Policy In The Long 1950s”. In Studies In Jewish History and Culture, Vol. 70, Pp. 11-24. Leiden: Brill. Read more.
Iris Nachum. 2021. Nationalbesitzstand und "Wiedergutmachung": Zur historischen Semantik sudetendeutscher Kampfbegriffe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Read more.
Iris Nachum. 2019. “Heinrich Rauchberg (1860–1938): A Reappraisal of a Central European Demographer's Life And Work”. Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 50, Pp. 78-98. doi:10.1017/s0067237818000619. Read online.
Iris Nachum and José Brunner . 2012. "Die Deutschen" als die Anderen – Deutschland in der Imagination seiner Nachbarn. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
Iris Nachum. 2010. “The History of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp As Reflected In Its Changing and Expanding Functions”. In: A Holocaust Crossroads: Jewish Women and Children in Ravensbrück, Pp. 17-36. London: Vallentine Mitchell.
Iris Nachum and Susan Neiman. 2010. Margherita von Brentano – Das Politische und Das Persönliche. Eine Collage. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
Selected Awards
Co-Organizer of the Research Group on Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context.
The Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, 2023-2024.
Member of the Young Scholars Forum in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018-2019.
Margherita von Brentano Prize, Free University Berlin, for the comprehensive processing and publication of Margherita von Brentano's literary estate, May 2010.
Teaching
Undergraduate courses
History of the Habsburg Empire in the Long 19th Century
History of Political Concepts and Ideas
Modern Central European History: The Bohemian Lands
Modern European Political Theories
Politics, Society and Culture in the Habsburg Monarchy (1848-1918)
Prague: Between the Hidden and the Revealed
Graduate courses
Law in Times of Crises: The Jurist Jacob Robinson (1889-1977)
The Compensation Project: Reparations for Historical Wrongs in Europe after 1945