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Dr Marco Duranti

BA (Harvard); PhD (Yale)
Lecturer
Room 851 MacCallum Building

+61 2 9036 9662

Marco Duranti joined the History Department in 2011. He received his doctorate in 2009 from Yale University, where he wrote his dissertation on the genesis of European human rights law. As a doctoral researcher, he was a Fulbright fellow at the European University Institute (2005-06) and a Fox fellow at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (2006-07). In 2010, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Max Planck research group on history and memory at the University of Konstanz. He is currently co-director of the Nation Empire Globe research cluster at the University of Sydney.

Research Areas

  • History of Modern Europe with a focus on Western European politics in the twentieth century
  • History of human rights
  • History of international law and international organisation
  • History of transnational flows, movements and networks

Current Projects

  • A political history of European human rights law
  • A transnational history of neoliberalism in Europe

Selected Publications

Books
  • Human Rights and Conservative Politics in Postwar Europe (Oxford University Press, under contract)
Articles
  • “Curbing Labour’s Totalitarian Temptation: European Human Rights Law and British Postwar Politics,” Humanity 3, no. 3 (Winter 2012), pp. 361-383.
  • “The Holocaust, the Legacy of 1789 and the Birth of International Human Rights Law: Revisiting the Foundation Myth,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (June 2012), pp. 159-186.
  • “Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (October 2006), pp. 663-683.
Chapters
  • “‘A Blessed Act of Oblivion’: Human Rights, European Unity and Postwar Reconciliation,” in Birgit Schwelling, ed., Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory (Transcript Verlag, 2012), pp. 115-139.
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Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching
  • HSTY1044: Twentieth-Century Europe (semester 2, 2013)
  • HSTY2616: The Human Rights Revolution (semester 1, 2013)
  • HSTY2652: Genocide in Historical Perspective
  • HSTY2659: Nationalism
  • HSTY7001: The History of Human Rights (semester 1, 2013)
Supervision

Topics in modern European history, especially those in twentieth-century Western European political history, and topics in the history of human rights.

Recent Presentations

  • “Human Rights ‘Reactionaries’: Conservative Politics and Supranational Justice in Postwar Europe.” Human Rights Seminar at University of California, Berkeley (20 February 2013)
  • “Old Wine in New Bottles: The Recasting of French Catholic Political Languages during the ‘Human Rights Revolution’ of the 1940s.” Princeton University workshop on “The Political Languages of Christian Democracy” (7 and 8 December 2012)
  • “Developments in Human Rights Theory and Practice.” Workshop at the University of Technology, Sydney on “Judging the Past in a Post Cold War World” (23 November 2012)
  • “Human Rights and the Frontiers of Europe.” University of New South Wales History Department Seminar (16 October 2012)
  • “The Politics of the ‘Human Rights Revolution’ in Postwar Europe.” Workshop held at the University of New South Wales on “Contemporary Critical Approaches to Human Rights” (17 August 2012)
  • “Human Rights and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” International conference held at the University of Sydney (10-11 August 2012) (conference co-organizer)
  • “The European Convention on Human Rights and Conservative Human Rights Discourse.” Conference held at the University of Jena on “Towards a New Moral Order? Human rights politics and international law since 1945” (29 June 2012)
  • “Rethinking Britain’s Place in the History of Human Rights.” North American Conference on British Studies held in Chicago (19 November 2011) (panel organizer and presenter)
  • “From Vichy to Strasbourg: Uncovering New Trajectories in the History of Human Rights.” International workshop on “Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights” held at the Erik Castrén Institute, University of Helsinki (28 October 2011)
  • “Globalizing la Guerre Scolaire: Christian Democracy, the Church Schools Controversy in France and the Construction of European Human Rights Law.” International conference on “Human Rights and Religion in Historical Perspective” held at Boston College (9 April 2011)
  • “European Human Rights Law as an Instrument of Political Reconciliation.” International workshop on “Political Reconciliation and Civil Society in 20th-century Europe” held at the University of Konstanz, sponsored by the Max Planck “History and Memory” research group and the Center of Excellence on “Cultural Foundations of Integration” (workshop co-organizer) (10 December 2010)
  • “Recasting Human Rights Discourse: The European Convention and the Conservative Turn, 1945-1950.” International conference on “Human Rights / Social Rights” held at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Postdam (3 December, 2010). (Variations on this paper delivered at the Columbia University Human Rights Seminar on 4 October 2010, at the Oxford History Faculty seminar series on 11 November 2010 and at the University of Chicago Human Rights Program seminar series on 18 January 2011)
  • “The Role of the Holocaust and the Politics of Silence in the Birth of International Human Rights Law.” International workshop on “Silence / Schweigen” at Schloss Wartegg (Switzerland). 11th Meeting of the research cluster “The Archaelogy of Literary Communication” (8 October 2010)
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