Lemkin Book Award
ISG's Lemkin Award honors Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide and first exponent of a United Nations Genocide Convention. The biennial award recognizes the best non-fiction book published in English or translated into English that focuses on the causes, prevention, response, or consequences of genocide and mass atrocities.
2025 Lemkin Book Award Recipient
The ISG is delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 Lemkin Book Award, Elyse Semerdjian, ‘Remnants: Embodied Archives Of The Armenian Genocide’ (Stanford, 2023).
The Lemkin Book Award committee, composed of an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the field of genocide studies, read over seventy books published in 2023 and 2024 and selected ‘Remnants’ for its methodological sophistication and compelling analysis about an understudied issue. The book explores the experiences of “Islamized” Armenian women and girls during the Armenian genocide, and how the lived trauma of mass violence is understood through their bodies.
Elyse Semerdjian is a Professor of History at Clark University.
The ISG will host a public lecture with the speaker in New York City in fall 2025, with details listed here.
The Lemkin Book Award judges also note the exceptional works that were finalists:
-Burnet, Jennie E., ‘To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide’
-Jardim, Tomaz, ‘Ilse Koch on Trial: Making The Bitch of Buchenwald’
-Meierhenrich, Jens, ‘Violence of Law’: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda’
-Walder, Andrew G. ‘Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China’s Southern Periphery’
2027 Book Award Nominations Call
The 2027 award cycle covers books published between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2026.
We are currently only accepting nominations for books published in 2025 (January 1st-December 31st, 2025).
NOMINATIONS MUST BE SUBMITTED BY MARCH 1, 2026.
Books from any discipline are accepted. Edited volumes, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and drama are excluded.
The award consists of a citation and the winner is invited to deliver a public address in New York City at an event convened by the Institute for the Study of Genocide in fall, 2027.
Prior to sending books please contact Lemkin Award Committee Chair, Professor Ernesto Verdeja at everdeja@nd.edu.
Past Winners
2023: Sabine Cadeau, More than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian–Dominican Borderlands (Cambridge, 2022)
2021: Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers, 2019)
2019: Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton, 2018)
2017: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (Yale, 2016)
2015: Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, 2 volumes (Oxford, 2104)
2013: Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, translation by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
2011: Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton, 2009)
2009: Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007)
2007: Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005)
2005: Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (Harper Collins, 2003)
2003: Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Harper Perennial, 2002)
2000: Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (Human Rights Watch and FIDH, 1999)
Judges for the Lemkin Book Award have included Joyce Apsel, Orlanda Brugnola, Bridget Conley, Daniel Feierstein, Helen Fein, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Alexander L. Hinton, Sheri Rosenberg, Roger Smith, Ernesto Verdeja, Jennifer Welsh, Linda Woolf, and Andrew Woolford.