New Books in Genocide Studies

The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Routledge, 2026) examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives consider Auschwitz’s history by engaging with Holocaust historiography and its place in Holocaust memory and representation, illustrating their mutual influence.

The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies.
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In Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty (Duke UP, 2025), Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims' remains for public display. Rwanda's genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms trauma heritage, wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized--made visible in public space--to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by "writing" them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda's genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
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How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2025) details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust. Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront.
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Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines the political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide in present-day Turkey, focusing on the region of Muş (Moush). Anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein explores how the 1915 genocide and dispossession of Armenians shaped property regimes, citizenship, and economic logics that continue to reverberate today.By combining ethnography with historical context and diverse perspectives, Temptations in Ruin generates new insights into how past violence shapes contemporary economic practices and social relations. To tell this history, von Bieberstein introduces the concept of “sovereign accumulation” to describe the ways in which the state and other actors mobilize histories of sovereign violence for present-day economic benefit. This framework illuminates the legacy of violence and resource extraction present in such practices as urban renewal projects, treasure hunting for “Armenian gold,” and heritage tourism and identifies these practices’ very existence as manifestations of the economic aftermath of the genocide.Temptations in Ruin uncovers the ways in which the genocide gave rise to a racialized property regime and a recursive movement of sovereign accumulation that builds on and re-animates the Armenian genocide as generative of wealth in the present. And it demonstrates the complex interplay between genocide denial, destruction, and valorization in post-genocide contexts. Highlighting the enduring resonance of genocide, von Bieberstein enhances our understanding of political violence’s long-term impacts on society and on the economy.

Alice von Bieberstein is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Humboldt University, Berlin.
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Written for educators, scholars, graduate students, and readers engaged in Holocaust education, genocide studies, history, ethics, religious studies, and political theory, This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today (‎iPub Cloud, 2026) treats teaching as a consequential act—one inseparable from the political realities in which it occurs. The volume challenges readers to reconsider what responsible Holocaust education demands now, and what it means to teach when historical memory itself is under strain.
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