Elyse Semerdjian wins 2025 Lemkin Book Award
Professor, author and social historian Elyse Semerdjian has just received the 2025 Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISG) for Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023). The work explores the embodied trauma of genocide by exploring its impact on Armenian bodies, skin and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones.
The biennial award is for the best nonfiction work that focuses on the causes, prevention, response or consequences of genocide and mass atrocities. The ISG is a non-profit human rights organization working for over 40 years to promote and disseminate scholarship and policy analysis on the causes, consequences and prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.
The Lemkin Book Award committee, composed of an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the field of genocide and atrocities studies, read over 70 books published in 2023 and 2024 and chose this work for its theoretical contributions, thorough research and originality.
The recognition consists of an award and a public event, where the recipient is invited to give a lecture on her work this coming fall at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
Past winners of the Lemkin Book Award have included Sabine Cadeau, Alison Crosby, M. Brinton Lykes, Geoffrey Robinson, Benjamin Madley, Mark Levene, Yang Jisheng, Emma Gilligan, Darius Rejali, Donald Bloxham, Peter Balakian, Samantha Power and Alison Des Forges.
