Lorena de Vita wins Heineken Award

International History of Reconciliation and Repair

In the field of International Relations, the focus is often on conflict and violence. Lorena De Vita’s research focuses precisely on a part of history that receives much less attention: reconciliation and reparation. This theme has been a common thread in De Vita’s work for some time. In 2020, her book Israelpolitik: German-Israeli Relations 1949-1969 was published on the reconciliation between Israel and Germany after World War II and the Holocaust. In addition, De Vita leads the NWO-sponsored project Wording Repair, which researches the history of reperations after World War II and the Holocaust. This project is part of another of De Vita’s projects, Holocaust Diplomacy: The Global Politics of Memory and Forgetting.

For her research focus, Lorena De Vita received the prestigious Heineken Young Scientist Award earlier this week. The jury wrote about her research: “Her in-depth archival work and use of primary sources are greatly appreciated by the jury. While the word ‘reparations’ regularly features in the news when it comes to colonial history, slavery, and racism, it is far from clear what this might mean in the international context. The jury commends De Vita’s research for clarifying this by describing histories of reparations and reconciliation between countries and peoples.”

Heineken Young Scientist Award

The Heineken Young Scientist Award is a biennal price that is awarded to young, talented researchers in the same scientific areas as the Heineken Prizes and are intended as an encouragement for further research. De Vita gained her award in the category Humanities. The prices are funded by the Alfred Heineken Fondsen Foundation. The Awards Ceremony will take place on 27 September 2024.