Lia Brazil
Dr. Lia Brazil specializes in histories of international law, humanitarianism and human rights during times of war and upheaval. Her research has explored these themes in the British Empire, with particular focus on Ireland and South Africa.
This is the subject of her book project, Ruling by Law, Resisting through Law: International Law in the British Empire, 1899-1922. This book presents a history of international law from the ground up, demonstrating how people navigated the complex and shifting rules of global governance that transformed conflicts in the early 20th century. Articles drawn from this research, which explore negotiations for international legal protections and the development of humanitarian networks during and after war in Ireland and South Africa, have been published in Humanity: A Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development (2023) and Women’s History Review (2022). A further book chapter on British military manuals was published in The Origins of International Legal Thought (Leiden, 2020).
At the University of Notre Dame, she will build on this research through the project, “An Irish History of Human Rights, 1922 – 1962,” which situates Irish activism for prisoner rights within a global framework. By focusing on the political campaigns and writings of mother and son, Maud Gonne and Seán MacBride, it asks whether Irish prison activism might shed light on the history of human rights.
This work forms the basis of a larger research project interested in the transnational history of political imprisonment and international activism in the twentieth century. Early insights from this research, on the International Committee for the Red Cross and women’s activism, are forthcoming in the English Historical Review, and form a case-study in the Atlas of the Irish Civil War (Cork, 2024).
Before arriving at Notre Dame, Dr. Brazil worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project “INGOs and the Long Humanitarian Century: Legacy, Legitimacy and Leading into the Future.” She conducted research for the project’s policy report Who do you think you are? (2023) and presented early findings of the report with Prof. Andrew Thompson to international organizations in the UK, USA, France and Switzerland. She is currently preparing an edited collection with Prof. Andrew Thompson and Prof. Mike Aaronson that historicizes current challenges facing international NGOs.
Dr. Brazil completed a Government of Ireland-funded PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, and her MA and BA in Dublin. She previously held a visiting fellowship at the Europe Institute, Columbia University, and acted as an undergraduate tutor at University College Dublin. Her research has been funded by Oxford History Faculty’s Beit Fund for Imperial and Commonwealth History, Oxford University Press’ John Fell Fund, the Irish Legal History Society, and the European University Institute.
At the University of Oxford Dr. Brazil taught classes on a range of topics in global and imperial history, including a graduate module on “Humanitarianism and the British Empire.” She coordinated the “Interdisciplinary Seminars on Empire” at Nuffield College reflecting her wider interest in intersections of law, politics and history. She acts as the editor of the European Review of History / revue européene d’histoire.
If you would like to be in contact with Dr. Brazil, you can find her at lbrazil@nd.edu.