The Argentine historian Prof. Dr Marina Franco of the Universidad de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, is internationally renowned for her work on political violence and human rights violations in southern Latin America. She has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize, which is endowed with €60,000. Her historiographical and epistemological work on the contested memory of repression and violence, on human rights, and on society’s coming to terms with the past is outstanding, as are her contributions to contemporary processes of political violence in democratic societies. Her innovative academic work has established her as one of the leading experts on contemporary Latin American history. She is a research fellow of Prof. Dr Christine Hatzky at the Institute of History. Prof. Franco will be in Hanover until October 2026; a second visit to Leibniz University is planned for summer 2027.
Her research into the secret military detention centre ESMA (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada) in Buenos Aires was pivotal in securing the inclusion of the ESMA Memorial on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. The ESMA was the most significant illegal extermination camp of the last Argentine dictatorship, where thousands of ‘disappeared’ people were abducted and murdered between 1976 and 1983. Franco’s work has made a significant contribution to our understanding of social processes of violence that can lead to extreme violence even in democratic societies, as well as to the social construction of a violent past.
In Germany, Professor Franco will continue her comparative research into massive state violence in different regions of the world.