New Histories for Enduring Conflicts
Lily Gardner Feldman
Senior Fellow
Dr. Lily Gardner Feldman is a Senior Fellow at AICGS. She previously served as the Harry & Helen Gray Senior Fellow at AICGS and directed the Institute’s Society, Culture & Politics Program. She has a PhD in Political Science from MIT.
From 1978 until 1991, Dr. Gardner Feldman was a professor of political science (tenured) at Tufts University in Boston. She was also a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, where she chaired the German Study Group and edited German Politics and Society; and a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, where she chaired the Seminar on the European Community and undertook research in the University Consortium for Research on North America. From 1990 until 1995, Dr. Gardner Feldman was the first Research Director of AICGS and its Co-director in 1995. From 1995 until 1999, she was a Senior Scholar in Residence at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. She returned to Johns Hopkins University in 1999.
Dr. Gardner Feldman has published widely in the U.S. and Europe on German foreign policy, German-Jewish relations, international reconciliation, non-state entities as foreign policy players, and the EU as an international actor. Her latest publications are: Germany’s Foreign Policy of Reconciliation: From Enmity to Amity, 2014; “Die Bedeutung zivilgesellschaftlicher und staatlicher Institutionen: Zur Vielfalt und Komplexität von Versöhnung,” in Corine Defrance and Ulrich Pfeil, eds., Verständigung und Versöhnung, 2016; and “The Limits and Opportunities of Reconciliation with West Germany During the Cold War: A Comparative Analysis of France, Israel, Poland and Czechoslovakia” in Hideki Kan, ed., The Transformation of the Cold War and the History Problem, 2017 (in Japanese). Her work on Germany’s foreign policy of reconciliation has led to lecture tours in Japan and South Korea.
The centennial anniversary of the Armenian genocide and the seventieth anniversary of World War II’s end in Europe and in the Pacific permit fresh, cross-cutting and comparative discussion regarding how those histories are remembered by societies and are recorded by historians. On January 15, 2015, AGI joined with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Washington Office, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Wilson Center for International Scholars to assemble a group of historians and social scientists to consider their role in writing and disseminating history in enduring conflicts in need of reconciliation.
The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung recently published a paper based on the conference, highlighting ten overarching themes from the three cases of Armenia-Turkey, Russia-Baltics, and Japan-Korea. AGI Senior Fellow and Director of the Society, Culture & Politics Program Dr. Lily Gardner Feldman chaired the panel on Japan-Korea and shares the outcomes from the panelists’ discussion. Read the report here.