This book offers a uniquely broad collection of theoretical and case-based deep dives into controversies over memory, healing, and rebuilding in post-atrocity settings.

Chunhui Peng and Henry C. Theriault bring together an international team of established and emerging scholars to offer new theoretical frameworks for understanding how reparative action has functioned in the past as well as models for approaching new contexts. These contributions are complemented by a broad geographical range of case-studies covering aftermaths of mass violence in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, South Africa, Guatemala, and Crimea, as well as the Armenian genocide. Along the way, the book engages issues of memory and denial, public education, material impacts, psychological trauma, and societal deformation and rehabilitation, all while considering micro-, macro-, and meso-level impacts of mass violence and resulting social and political dynamics of longstanding impediments to reconciliation and the restoration of victim communities.

The end result is a series of new connections between culture and memory to issues of transition, reconciliation, and justice after atrocity.

Chunhui Peng is Associate Professor of Chinese at San Jose State University, USA. Her areas of interest include contemporary Chinese literature and culture, late Qing print culture, and Chinese diaspora. She has published journal articles on memory of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.


Henry Theriault is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, Worcester State University, USA. His research focuses on genocide denial, genocide prevention, post-genocide victim-perpetrator relations, reparations, and mass violence against women and girls. Before taking his current position in 2017, he served for nineteen years as a professor in the Philosophy Department at Worcester State University.