In The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, Princeton University Press, 2009), Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, uses ethnographic work on victims of disasters, wars, and persecutions to analyze more broadly the moral significance of trauma, its use as a political resource for reparation, testimony, or proof, and the advent of the victim in the contemporary world.