David Crowe, professor of history, has been awarded Elon's first full-year faculty sabbatical in order to do research for a new book he is writing. The award was announced at Fall Convocation on Oct. 23.
Crowe’s book, titled “War Crimes, Genocide, and the Quest for Justice since the Enlightenment,” will discuss such crimes during this period and their impact on the evolution of international law. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust as well as the international legal response to war crimes and genocide in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkans since 1945.
In his application, Crowe discussed the ties between his scholarship and teaching.
“I now view scholarship as a way to create a new body of knowledge to share with my students,” Crowe said. “I will use this model for the book project now under consideration, since it will fill a void not only in higher education but also in the public trade market. This will be a two dimensional scholarly work with considerable value educationally – speaking. First of all, my publisher and reviewers think that it will become the standard work in the field. Secondly, this project will be quite valuable to my students at Elon University, not only in terms of the classroom, where I teach courses directly related to the subject matter in the book, but also to an increasing number of my students doing research projects on various aspects of international criminal law and international justice. It will also strengthen my role as a teacher and a mentor.”
Crowe is one of Elon’s most prolific scholars, and was named the first recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2000. His biography of Oskar Schindler in 2004 received worldwide acclaim for its groundbreaking view of a historical figure. He has also written “A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe andRussia” and “The Baltic States and the Great Powers: Foreign Relations,1938-1940.” He is president emeritus of the Association for the Studyof Nationalities at Columbia University and a member of the EducationCommittee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,D.C. Crowe is also a fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian andEastern European Studies at the University of North Carolina at ChapelHill.