Dr
Roman
Birke
Academic biography
Roman Birke holds a PhD in History from the University of Vienna. Before coming to DCU in the summer of 2025, Roman spent time in Germany, Ireland, Austria, and the United States. He was an Assistant Professor at the Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS) at the University of Regensburg (2024-25), a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (2017-2024), a visiting fellow at the Department of History at Columbia University (2015-16), an Erasmus+ fellow at the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin (2017), and a Fritz Thyssen Foundation Fellow of the Study Group Human Rights in the 20th Century (2017-18). From 2013 to 2017 Roman held a PhD-position at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna.
Research interests
Roman is a historian of Modern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. He views Europe in its international and transnational connections and is particularly interested in the role of international law and international criminal law. His first book, Population Control as a Human Right. International Law and the Global Quest to Curb Overpopulation (Cambridge University Press, 2025), investigates human rights based arguments aiming to restrict reproductive freedoms. The historical actors discussed in his book argued that human rights could only be guaranteed when population growth was restricted. In his current work, he investigates domestic and international legal arguments for the advancement of genetic screening and counseling in European countries across the Iron Curtain from the 1960s. He is also interested in historical property regimes and engages in research on property policies of German colonialism. With a background in IT and the digital humanities, Roman has become increasingly interested in the role of AI for historical research. While his main focus is on classical methods of historiographical research, he explores the potential of AI for large-scale archival records emerging from international criminal trials such as the Nuremberg Trials, the ICTY, or the ICTR.