Committed to the doctoral programs of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies as well as to Clark’s Holocaust and Genocide undergraduate concentration, I like working with graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in the social, cultural, and gender history of mass violence in Europe in the 20th century, especially the Holocaust.
B.A. and M.A. advisees of mine have studied topics such as Holocaust memory in Poland; the pedagogy of Holocaust memorial museums; Nazi families in postwar Germany; the meaning of forgiveness after the Holocaust; the American memorialization of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps; sexual encounters of American soldiers in Japan after 1945; sexuality and romantic relationships during the Holocaust; the Jewish Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz; the German opposition against genocide against the Herero and Nama; Gustav Landauer’s thinking about community and the nation; Nazi Germany’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War; the social cohesion of the Red Army in World War II; the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945; representations of male bonding in American World War II movies; and the symbolism of the Neo-Nazi Movement in the United States.
Doctoral students who have worked with me include:
Gabrielle Hauth: “Intimacy in Ravensbrück: Sex, Violence, and Survival in a Nazi Concentration Camp.” Graduation 2022; currently Editorial Assistant at the Washington, D.C. bureau of the German newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL
Jason Tingler: “Mosaic of Destruction: The Holocaust and Interethnic Violence in Chelm, 1939-1947.” Graduation 2019; currently Lecturer, Marion Technical College, Marion, Ohio
Kimberly Partee Allar: “Education in Violence: Training Guards in Nazi Concentration Camps and Killing Centers.” Graduation 2019; currently Senior Consultant, Booz Allen Hamilton, Washington, DC
Mihai Poliec: “A Dangerous Proximity. The Civilian Society and the Holocaust in Romania’s Borderlands, 1941-1944.” Graduation 2018; currently Postgraduate Research Associate, Hawaii Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Department of Defense, Honolulu, Hawaii; publication: The Holocaust in the Romanian Borderlands: The Arc of Civilian Complicity, Routledge, 2019.
Michael Geheran: “Betrayed Comradeship: German-Jewish WWI Veterans under Hitler.” Graduation 2016, currently Assistant Professor of History and Deputy Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York; publication: Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler, Cornell University Press, 2020
Cristina Andriani: “Post-Holocaust Trauma and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” co-advised with Jaan Valsiner, Psychology Department; graduation 2013, currently Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Grafton, Mass.
Currently are working under my supervision:
Maayan Armelin: “Follow Me into Genocide: Leadership Styles and Social Relations in the SS-Einsatzgruppen”
Lauren Ashley Bradford: “Violent Women in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America”
Hana Green: “Passing as Aryan: Female Jewish Identity during the Holocaust”
Sandra Grudic: “Genocide in former Yugoslavia: A Microstudy”
Ellen Johnson: “Jewish Identity Groups in the Nazi Ghettos”
Emil Kjerte: “Ustaša Killing Specialists: The Personnel of the Jasenovac Camp Complex”
Jessa Sinnott: “Anti-Jewish Pogroms and Neighborhood Violence in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1941”
On behalf of the Strassler Center and together with its doctoral students, I have initiated and convened the First, the Second and the Fourth International Graduate Conference on Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2009, 2012, and 2018. Selected papers of the first of these conferences are published in The Holocaust and Local History, edited by Thomas Kühne and Tom Lawson (Edgware: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2011), also available as special issue of Holocaust Studies. A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 16, 2011, nos. 1-2.