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Mark A. Lewis

Associate Professor

Professor Lewis is interested in the cultural, legal, and social history of Southeastern and Central Europe (the Balkans, Germany, and Austria), especially comparisons between regions and across traditionally defined political eras. Currently he is researching the history of the Vienna police between 1914 and 1945, aiming to show the continuities and discontinuities in this institution. He was a Research Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (http://www.vwi.ac.at/index.php/en/institute) in 2016-17 to work on this project. He has also studied the development of international criminal law from a transnational perspective, concentrating on the role of non-governmental organizations as the main producers of new ideas.

His book The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2014, paperback 2016), explains attempts to establish international criminal courts and build the field of international criminal law from the end of World War One to the beginning of the Cold War. The manuscript won the Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize in 2013 and the inaugural Bronisław Geremek Prize in 2015 for “for an outstanding academic book in the field of European civilization and history.”

He is also the co-author of Himmler’s Jewish Tailor: The Story of Jacob Frank, Holocaust Survivor from Lublin (Syracuse University Press, 2000). This is an oral history of a Polish Jewish tailor who was the head of a clothing factory at the Lipowa Street labor camp, run by the SS in Lublin. Frank, one of the few survivors of the Lublin ghetto, describes ghetto life, the Nazi production system, and the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942. He also explains his time in the camps of Natzweiler and Dachau. He served as a witness in West German war crimes trials in Frankfurt in the 1970s, including the trial of Lipowa commandant Wolfgang Mohwinkel. 

Degrees

PhD., University of California, Los Angeles

MA., University of California, Los Angeles

AB., Stanford University

Scholarship and Publications

Lewis, Mark. “The History of the International Association of Penal Law, 1924–1950:

Liberal, Conservative, or Neither?” In Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, vol. 4, edited by Morten Bergsmo, Cheah Wui Ling, and Yi Ping, 599-660. Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2015. https://www.legal-tools.org/en/doc/740a53/

Lewis, Mark. The Birth of the New Justice:  The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 and 2016. ISBN:  978-0-19-966028-5. See the publisher’s website:  http://tinyurl.com/birth-of-the-new-justice

Lewis, Mark. “The Failure of the Austrian and Yugoslav Police to Repress the Croatian Ustaša in Austria:  1929-1934, “Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014): 186-212. http://journals.cambridge.org/repo_A92LNaVq

Lewis, Mark. “The World Jewish Congress and the Institute of Jewish Affairs at Nuremberg: Ideas, Strategies, and Political Goals, 1942-1946.” Yad Vashem Studies 36 (2008): 181-210.

Lewis, Mark and Jacob Frank. Himmler’s Jewish Tailor:  The Story of Holocaust Survivor Jacob Frank. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. See the publisher’s website:  http://syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/2000/himmlers-jewish-tailor.html

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Contact Information

Office: Building 2N Room 208
Fax: 718.982.2864