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Professor of Politics, Law, and Society
Michael Scott Bryant
Michael S. Bryant is a Professor of History and Legal Studies specializing in the impact of the Holocaust on the law, human rights, German criminal law, and international humanitarian law. Professor Bryant has worked in the United States and abroad in Holocaust research and education. He received a B.A. from The Ohio State University, a J.D. from Emory University, and a Ph.D. in Modern European History from The Ohio State University, and has taught for The Ohio State University, the University of Toledo, Bryant University, Creighton University Law School, and the National Judicial College in the areas of history, criminal justice, law, and human rights. He also served as an Assistant Staff Judge Advocate in the U.S. Air Force (1990-94). Professor Bryant is the author of Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-53 (University Press of Colorado, 2005) and numerous articles on the postwar adjudication of Nazi-era crimes. He has served as a member of the Peer Review Committee for the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program and is currently a member of the Board of Editors for Human Rights Review. Additionally, he has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the German Exchange Service (DAAD), the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Professor Bryant’s study of the major West German "Operation Reinhard" death camp investigations and trials of the 1960’s was published in 2014 by the University of Tennessee Press, winning the Book of the Year Award from the American National Chapter, Association Internationale de Droit Penal. His third book, A World History of War Crimes, was published in the fall of 2015 by Bloomsbury Academic Press in London (the second, significantly expanded edition was published in 2021). In 2020 he published Nazi Crimes and their Punishment (Hackett) and in 2021 his co-authored casebook Comparative Law: Global Legal Traditions (Carolina Academic Press) appeared in print. He has been interviewed by local, regional, national, and international media, including Time magazine, NPR, The Spectator, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Hearst TV, and many others. Dr. Bryant is currently working on a documentary film on Chelmno, the Nazis' first death camp, and a study of Kurt Schwedersky's investigation into the Treblinka death camp.
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