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Join us for a Meet VCU Authors event with Jessica Trisko Darden, Associate Professor of Political Science at VCU, and author of "The Accused: How Women Faced Justice for Nazi-Era Crimes."

Description

To date, our understanding of women’s participation in Nazi war crimes has been shaped by political decisions made by men, which reflect entrenched gender norms that diminish both women’s agency and their accountability. Jessica Trisko Darden offers a corrective to this by providing a groundbreaking holistic account of the variety of war crimes that women of all ages committed during the Nazi era, as well as the range of legal outcomes that they faced in the wake of the Second World War. By analyzing the archival records of German trials, Trisko Darden observes that postwar divisions in Germany contributed to disparities in sentencing between men and women, which in turn allowed some women, particularly those in West Germany, to receive more lenient sentences than others, or to be acquitted altogether. Her rigorous analysis of these women’s cases makes an important contribution to scholarship on women’s agency and culpability in perpetrating violence.

About the Speaker

Jessica Trisko Darden, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she runs the (In)Security Lab.