Vanessa VOISIN
Associate professor at the University of Bologna, Vanessa Voisin devotes her research to the political and social history of the USSR, notably wartime and postwar USSR. Her ongoing projects explore various facets of justice: as a political tool (to assert authority and to police society), as a mode of communication (among various State actors and social groups), and as a form of historical narrative (trials of war crimes or betrayal). While rooted in concrete spaces – Ukraine, Southern Russia, Belarus – this project requires a steady gaze across multiple levels of analysis: the pan-Soviet level, the Soviet block, and eventually international relations. In 2017-2020 she coordinated an ANR project about war-crimes trials in central and eastern Europe from 1943 to 1991, hosted at the CERCEC (https://anr.fr/Projet-ANR-16-CE27-0001).
Among her recent pulications: L’URSS contre ses traîtres. L’Épuration soviétique, 1941-1955, (The USSR vs. Its Traitors: Soviet Purges 1941-1955), Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015; “Soviet Footage of War Crimes, 1941–1946: Between Propaganda and Judicial Evidence,” in Defeating Impunity: Attempts at International Justice in Europe since 1914, ed. Ornella Rovetta and Pieter Lagrou (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022), 146–73; with Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva as coeditors, Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe: A People’s Justice?, Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe 29 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2022).
