R.M. (Rachel) Johnston-White, PhD

Rachel Johnston-White is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University (2017), an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge (2011), and a BA in History & French Studies with High Honors from Emory University (2010). Prior to coming to Groningen, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Vienna School of International Studies from 2017 to 2019. She has been a fellow at the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna, as well as a Visiting Researcher at Sciences Po, Paris; the University of Glasgow; and Aberystwyth University. 

She is currently completing the manuscript for her book project, "Christianity in Conflict: Resistance and Human Rights in France." The project explores how left-wing or dissident Christians in 20th-century France understood their relationship to the state and their obligation of obedience as citizens. It argues that the politicization of conscience offered a challenge to the postwar European human rights consensus, in which state sovereignty remained relatively unchecked, especially in the colonial sphere. Her work has appeared in Past & Present, Journal of Contemporary History, H-Diplo, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporary European History, and the volume Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

She is also at work on a new NWO-funded project, "Photographing torture: Cultures of violence and soldiers as witnesses during the Algerian War." During the Algerian War (1954-1962), torture was an institutionalized weapon of war and the subject of drafted soldiers’ personal photography. To date, studies that address such photographs have focused on their original usage as evidence of war crimes. Yet we must consider these photographs as non-neutral sources that reflect both military cultures of violence and soldier-photographers’ personal views, aims, and social-cultural milieus. As photography gains contemporary importance as “verifiable” proof of war crimes, it is vital to investigate how the intentions of soldier-photographers as participants in, or opponents of, violence shape the content and potential uses of war atrocity photographs.