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Dr. Iris Nachum | History Department

Dr. Iris Nachum

Iris Nachum
Dr.
Iris
Nachum
Deputy Director of the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights
Humanities Building, Rooms 44-610 and 41-529.
Office Hours: Wednesdays, upon appointment

I am a historian of modern Central Europe with a special interest in compensation and restitution; liberalism and nationalism; ethnic conflict and expulsion. My research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary, covering history, political theory and law. Since September 2020, I serve as Deputy Academic Director of the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.I hold a B.A. and M.A. degree in political science, and in 2017, I received my PhD from the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. The topic of my dissertation is the Sudeten German discourse on compensation in interwar Czechoslovakia, which I trace back to the national conflict between ethnic Germans and Czechs in the post-1848 Habsburg monarchy. The topic of my current book-length project is a West German compensation law called “Equalization of Burdens Law” (Lastenausgleichsgesetz). The main aim of this 1952 law was to compensate ethnic Germans who had been expelled or forced to flee from Central and Eastern Europe to Germany at the end of World War II. Compensation was for expulsion-related material damages and losses. I am especially interested in cases where expellees demanded redress for lost property which they had acquired in the context of “Aryanization”.