Recent Publications

• LaBranche, Jillian. 2026. “Explaining the Elusion of Victim Hierarchies in Sierra Leone.” Cultural Sociology. Online First.

• LaBranche, Jillian and Joachim J. Savelsberg. 2026. “Stigma Management and Cultural Trauma: A Rwanda-Germany Comparison.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 14(1): 76-109.

• LaBranche, Jillian and Joachim Savelsberg. 2025.“Universal Jurisdiction and Civil Society: Institutional Learning and Knowledge about Mass Atrocity Crimes.” Sociology Compass 19(11).

• Savelsberg, Joachim J., Jillian LaBranche, and Miray Philips. 2025. “Prosecutorial-NGO Complex: New Legal Opportunity Structures and the Role of (I)NGOs in Universal Jurisdiction Trials on Syria.” Law & Society Review 59(4): 716-748.

• LaBranche, Jillian. 2024. “Macro-Micro Interaction in Knowledge Construction: Structural and Communicative Memory in Rwanda and Sierra Leone.” American Journal of Sociology 130(3): 644-685.

About Me

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in August 2025, where my dissertation received an honorable mention for the Distinguished Dissertation Award and was also recognized with an honorable mention by the American Sociological Association.

My research interests include collective memory, education, transitional justice, mass violence, and comparative methodology. Broadly, I study how societies recover from mass violence, with particular attention to how knowledge is constructed in its wake.

My current book project analyzes how educators and parents in Rwanda and Sierra Leone narrate and teach their recent episodes of violence to newer generations. It positions education not only as a site of memory construction but also as a means of transitional justice. It investigates how knowledge produced by macro-level institutions (states, transitional justice mechanisms) interacts with knowledge held and transmitted at the microsociological level (parents, educators).

A second book project, co-authored with Joachim Savelsberg, is under contract with the University of California Press. It examines how domestic and international NGOs contribute to universal jurisdiction trials in Europe against agents of the Syrian regime and their role in disseminating knowledge about these trials.

My work has been supported by the Fern & Bernard Badzin Graduate Fellowship for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the American Sociological Association, the University of Minnesota Travel Research Thesis Grants, the US Fulbright Program, the National Academy of Education/Spencer, and the University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. My published work has received awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the American Sociological Association, and the University of Minnesota.

I have worked with the Human Trafficking Center, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I also hold an MA in International Human Rights from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and an MA in Sociology from Brandeis University.