A. Dirk Moses

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Anthony Dirk Moses, born in 1967 in Brisbane, Australia, is a historian who studies genocide, colonialism, and how the idea of genocide has developed over time. In 2022 he took the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professorship of Political Science at the City College of New York, after previously serving as the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is widely regarded as a leading scholar on genocide, especially in colonial contexts, and he coined the term “racial century” to describe the period from 1850 to 1950. Moses is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Moses is the son of Ingrid Moses, a former university chancellor, and the historian John A. Moses. He studied history, government, and law at the University of Queensland, earning his BA in 1987. He then pursued graduate work at several institutions: an MPhil in early modern European history at the University of St Andrews (1989), an MA in modern European history at the University of Notre Dame (1994), and a PhD in modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley (2000). His doctoral research looked at how West German intellectuals discussed the Nazi past and the future of democracy in Germany.

His teaching and research career has taken him from Australia to Europe and the United States. He taught at the University of Sydney from 2000 to 2010 and again from 2016, becoming a full professor in 2016. He spent time at the European University Institute as the Chair of Global and Colonial History from 2011 to 2015. In 2020 he was named the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at UNC Chapel Hill. Moses has also held several fellowships, including for projects on the “Racial Century,” at the Charles H. Revson Foundation/Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2004–05), a study visit funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2007), and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2010). He was a visiting fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in 2019 and a senior fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen (2019–20).

In the scholarly community, Moses is known for his wide editing and advisory work. He has served as a senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011 and co-edits the War and Genocide book series for Berghahn Books. He sits on several editorial boards, including journals on African military history, perpetrator research, memory studies, and patterns of prejudice, among others. He also serves on advisory boards for institutions such as the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, University College Dublin’s Centre for War Studies, the Memory Studies Association, and the RePast project, and he is associated with the International State Crime Initiative.

Moses has published influential books and essays that connect the history of genocide to imperialism and settler colonialism. In German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007), he argued that West Germany’s process of coming to terms with its Nazi past was treated by many as a universal liberal model. He also highlighted Raphael Lemkin’s broad idea of genocide and linked it to settler colonialism. His work on Indigenous violence in Australia and Canada placed the Nazi era in a global context of empire and counterinsurgency, most notably in the anthology Empire, Colony, Genocide (2008) and in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Aboriginal Children in Australian History (2004).

Moses’ more recent work challenges simple, moralizing explanations of genocide. In The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (2021), he argues that international law and genocide memory can obscure the strategic motives behind mass violence. He suggests that leaders can use violence to secure a nation’s borders and people when they pursue “permanent security,” a utopian and dangerous idea that can legitimize mass killings. He contends that genocide should not be the sole lens for understanding violence, and he warns that focusing too much on the Holocaust can export the problem of mass violence into a narrow frame.

In 2021 Moses also published criticism of how some German scholars and public debates have treated the Holocaust, arguing that an authoritarian moralization of the Nazi past can target people of color. This sparked sustained discussion in German media and academia about the relationship between the Holocaust, colonial violence, and Germany’s stance toward Israel and Palestine.

Overall, Moses’ work pushes for a broader, more complex understanding of genocide and mass violence—one that situates it within the long history of empire, colonial rule, and state security, rather than seeing it as a problem only tied to a single event or period.