Elena Kempf

Elena Kempf is a historian of international law and modern Germany in its global context. Her research focuses on the creation and contestation of codified laws on modern weapons of war.

Professor Kempf is currently working on her first book, titled Humanitarian Calculus: The Workings of Weapons Prohibitions in Modern International Law. The book is about the problem of runaway advancements in weaponry since the 1860s, and how a vast set of characters—diplomats, international lawyers, and politicians, but also surgeons, chemists, teachers and artists—sought to curtail these technological developments by outlawing them. The project of weapons prohibitions, she shows, reflected and shaped a world that made moral distinctions between different weapons while acquiescing to war as an instrument of state policy. Her next book project will be a history of arms exports from the three postwar Germanies (East Germany, West Germany, and reunified Germany) to countries in the Global South.

In addition, Professor Kempf maintains a research interest in the relationship between the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the EU. You can find her recent and forthcoming publications in journals including Critical Military Studies, AJIL Unbound, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Heidelberg Journal of International Law.

At MIT, Professor Kempf teaches an introductory class on the history of modern Europe (21H.143J, The Making of Modern Europe, 1789–Present), and seminars on the history of modern Germany and the laws of war.

Professor Kempf earned her PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2021. Before joining MIT, she taught as a Lecturer at the Department of History at Stanford University and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at UC Berkeley.