Professor Sabine Lee

Professor Sabine Lee joined the Department of History at the University of Birmingham in 1994 following an earlier lectureship at the University of Hull. Her academic background is notably interdisciplinary: she studied history, mathematics, and philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf, completing her Staatsexamen in 1989. She then moved to the University of Cambridge, earning an M.Phil. in International Relations in 1990 before completing a doctoral dissertation on Anglo‑German relations after the Second World War under the supervision of David Reynolds.

Listed below are the fields in which Sabine Lee is able to offer supervision of research postgraduates.
Conflict-related gender-based violenceSocial consequences of war and conflictChildren Born of WarChildren and WarHistory of UN Peacekeeping

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Professor Lee’s research has evolved significantly over her career. Her early scholarship examined refugees, expellees, and their organisations in post‑war Germany, later expanding to explore twentieth‑century international relations, with a particular emphasis on British‑German relations and European cooperation after 1945. More recently, her work has turned to the social consequences of war, with a distinctive focus on conflict‑related gender‑based violence and children born of war - defined as children fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers in conflict or post‑conflict settings

She has led and co-led several major international research initiatives, including CHIBOW, an EU-funded interdisciplinary doctoral training network dedicated to the study of children born of war , and an AHRC‑funded project investigating peacekeeper‑fathered children in Haiti. Her collaborative portfolio includes SHRC and SSHRC-funded work on peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse in DRC and Haiti and FCDO-funded work exploring the intersection of forced migration and vulnerabilities to sexual violence.

Professor Lee has published widely on the human rights and lived experiences of children born of war, most recently in her monograph Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century. Using the evidence of the academic research, she has used creative and artistic means of communicate to diverse non-academic audiences, for instance through film and theatre. Her co-produced film The Wound is Where the Light Enters won the AHRC Research in Film Award 2021, and a theatre-based initiative related to the CHIBOW network was awarded the Ralf-Dahrendorf Price in 2021.

Professor Lee currently co-directs, with Dr Susan Bartels from Queen’s University, Kingston, the RESPONDER Partnership, a SSHRC-funded research network on responder-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse in six conflict-and post-conflict countries.