Researchers: Sara Weydner

I am a post-graduate research fellow at the Department of History of Humboldt-University and member of the research project “The London Moment”. I studied history and political science in Freiburg and Montreal as well as North American Studies at Freie University in Berlin, and received a master’s degree in 2015. My master thesis dealt with transnational networks in international family planning and population control after World War II. It was awarded with the Prize of the Department of History and Cultural Studies for Gender Studies and published as an article in Geschichte und Gesellschaft in 2018.

In my Ph.D. project, I follow up on my fascination with internationalism in the twentieth century and focus on the transnational collaboration of émigré jurists in the “London Moment”. I am asking how and why émigré jurists engaged in internationalising criminal law in the 1940s. Different sites of transnational cooperation will serve as case studies to dissect the specific local intellectual and social conditions that shaped the émigré jurists’ work in international criminal law and international criminal law reform. This “social history of ideas” draws from a range of methodological approaches from legal sociology, transnational history, and the history of knowledge. The biographies of individual jurists are employed as a heuristic tool to uncover competing interpretations of international criminal and humanitarian law as well as ways of negotiating a common position among émigré jurists.

Contact: sara.weydner_at_hu-berlin.de