Professor Sabine Lee

Sabine Lee is a Professor 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.

Listed below are the fields in which Sabine Lee is able to offer supervision of research postgraduates.

Children Born of War; Children and War
History of UN Peacekeeping
Conflict-related gender-based violence
Social consequences of war and conflict
20th century British history
20th century international relations
19th and 20th century history of science (particularly mathematics and physics)
20th German history

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

Sabine’s current research is mainly concerned with the social consequences of war.  A focus has been gender-based violence in war and children born of war, that is children fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers in conflict and post-conflict situations.  She is currently coordinator of CHIBOW, an international interdisciplinary and intersectoral network on Children Born of War and PI on an AHRC-funded network and research project on peacekeeper fathered children in Haiti.

In collaboration with Susan Bartels (Queen’s University, Kingston/Ontario) and Bob McKelvey (Oregon Health and Science University, Portland) she has recently completed a Wellcome Trust-funded research project comparing the life courses of Amerasians in the US and Vietnam.  Sabine has published widely on the social consequences of war, human rights of children born of war, specific case studies and historical comparisons of such children throughout the 20th century, most recently in her monograph Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century.

• Soldiers' children and their role in policies of national rebirth

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.

Another research focus has been the history of 20th century science, and in particular physics.  Sabine has published a scholarly edition of the private and scientific correspondence of Rudolf Peierls, co-edited a volume on the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction and the Nuclear Many-body Problem and a Festschrift for the American theoretical physicist Gerald E. Brown.  She has also published an edition of the complete correspondence of Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls.