Dirk Moses

Professional Background

Professor Dirk Moses received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in history from the University of Notre Dame, a M. Phil. in history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and a B.A. in history from the University of Queensland. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was Assistant Professor of History at the University of Sydney in Australia. For his Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Professor Moses conducted research for his project “The Racial Century: Bio-Politics and Genocide in Europe and Its Colonies, 1850-1950.”

Professor Moses is a recipient of a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery grant, the most competitive fellowship in the Australian university system. He is the editor of Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Aboriginal Children in Australian History (Berghahn Books, 2004), in which he reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and places them in a larger global context, and co-editor with Dan Stone of Colonialism and Genocide (Routledge, 2006). He is also the author of scholarly articles and book chapters on genocide and the Holocaust, including “Structure and Agency in the Holocaust” in History and Theory (vol. 37, 1998); “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century: Genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust” in Patterns of Prejudice (vol. 36, 2002), and “The Holocaust and Genocide” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, Dan Stone, ed. (Palgrave, 2004). Professor Moses convened the M.A. in Holocaust studies at the University of Sydney, and at the time of his fellowship was associate editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Fellowship Research

During his tenure at the Museum, Professor Moses continued research on a book project on genocide in the twentieth century, with a focus on Germany and Australia. In his fellowship project he tested the hypothesis that the Holocaust was a project of racial cleansing and colonial self-assertion that consciously sought to achieve for Germans what the imperial endeavors of rival European powers had achieved before World War I – permanent security and well-being for the domestic population conceived as the citadel and bearer of a superior European culture. Professor Moses used the Museum’s archival sources on Nazi racial hygiene, the “Rasse-und Siedlungshauptamt der SS,” Nuremberg Trials, and materials collected for the Museum’s “Deadly Medicine” exhibit.

Residency Period: October 25, 2004 - March 1, 2005