Charlotte Kiechel

Charlotte Kiechel is a PhD Candidate in the History Department. Her research examines political ​uses of the genocide term, its relation to Holocaust memory, and its ​import within​ ​the anti-atrocity battles of the Cold War.​ Her dissertation, ”The Politics of Comparison: Holocaust Memory and Visions of Third World Suffering, 1954-1980,” ​investigates the ​anti-genocide campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s and does so as a means to rethink how historians have traditionally narrated Holocaust memory’s global rise.​ It argues that claims of national self-determination were central to Holocaust memory’s mid-twentieth century proliferation. It also unveils the role that members of the Global South played in this story of global diffusion. Her broader research interests include: comparative colonialism, human rights, decolonization, and political and cultural responses to mass atrocity.

 

Kiechel earned her B.A. from Williams College and has received her M.A. and M.Phil degrees from Yale. She has been a recipient of the Fulbright fellowship. Her work has been supported by international research institutions such as the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, DAAD, and the Max Weber Foundation. In 2019, she was a Fox Fellow to the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris. She has also received fellowships from the USC Shoah Foundation Center, the German Historical Institute, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

 

At Yale, she has organized the International History Workshop and the Modern European History colloquium. She has also served as a graduate affiliate to Davenport College, a McDougal Fellow to the Office of Career Strategy, and tutor for the Yale College Writing Center.

 

She hails from New York and spent part of her childhood in Brussels.

 

“Legible Testimonies: Raphaël Lemkin, the Victim’s Voice, and the Global History of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13, no. 1 (2019): 42-63.

 

“Global History and Decolonization: A Moment of Possibility, a Call for Integration,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development (forthcoming, 2022).

 

“Connected Histories: Decolonization and the 20th Century,” April 26-27, 2019, Yale University

 

“Reckoning with Empire: The Right to Self-Determination in Historical View,” November 12-13, 2021, Yale University