Sabine Lee is a Reader in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. After studying history, mathematics and philosophy at Düsseldorf University, which she completed with a Staatsexamen in 1989, she obtained an M.Phil in International Relations at the University of Cambridge in 1990. She continued her studies at Cambridge with a project on Anglo-German Relations after the Second World War under David Reynolds. This resulted in a doctoral dissertation which was submitted in 1992.
In January 1993, she joined the Department of European Studies at the University of Hull as Lecturer in Modern History. Since September 1994 she has been at the Department of Modern History here at Birmingham.
Sabine’s current research is located in two distinct areas. More recently, she has engaged in studies of children born of war, that is children fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers in conflict and post-conflict situations. She is involved in the international interdisciplinary research network on children born of war and had published several papers on issues such as the human rights of children born of war, specific case studies and historical comparisons of such children throughout the 20th century.
The second are of research concerns the history of 20th century science, and in particular physics. Sabine has recently co-edited a volume on the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction and the Nuclear Many-body Problem and she is currently working on a Festschrift for the American theoretical physicist Gerald E. Brown. Prior to this, Sabine edited a selection of the private and scientific correspondence of the physicist Rudolf Peierls. She has also published an edition of the complete correspondence of Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls.
Past research
After earlier research on refugees and expellees and their organisations in post-war Germany, Sabine turned to 20th century international relations. Here she focussed in particular on British-German relations after 1945 and post-war European integration and co-operation. More recently she has studied some questions of 20th century scientific developments and the interplay between science and politics.