Paul Morrow is a philosopher and human rights scholar whose work focuses on visual encounters with mass violence. He was most recently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton (USA) and a Visiting Research Fellow at University College Dublin. His work has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the International Peace Museum, and the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University. Major publications include Seeing Atrocities (Oxford University Press, 2025), Unconscionable Crimes (MIT Press, 2020), and the co-edited book Museums and Mass Violence (Routledge, 2024). In addition to his scholarly work, Morrow has curated museum exhibits on Mis- and Disinformation and on America’s wars in Southeast Asia.

Paul Morrow’s project as a NOMIS Fellow focuses on the Polish-Jewish philanthropist Jan Bloch (1835-1902) and his creation of the world’s first peace museum. Drawing on archival, bibliographic, and artifactual sources, Morrow aims to reconstruct the visual arguments for peace that Bloch developed over the decade 1893-1902, culminating in the foundation of the International Museum of War and Peace in Lucerne, Switzerland. Chief among those arguments are the increasing lethality of weapons of war; the economic and social disruptions caused by industrialized warfare; the demoralizing effects of standing armies and compulsory military service; and the lack of lasting benefits to be gained from wars between great powers. Drawing together dioramas, lantern slides, data visualizations, and before-and-after photographs, as well as cannons, architectural models, and human skeletons, the Lucerne Museum attracted a diverse audience of military officers and pacifists, ambassadors and war artists. While the First World War forced the closure of Bloch’s pioneering museum, the arguments and images he curated on the shore of Lake Lucerne continue to hold lessons for 21st century peace advocates.