List of Contributors

Anna-Carolin Augustin is a postdoctoral research fellow in German and Jewish history at the German Historical Institute Washington. In her current project, she examines the history of Jewish ritual objects, cultural reconstruction, and memory after the Holocaust. Her recent articles include ‘Leo I. Lessmann’s Lost Judaica Collection. Towards a Collaborative Approach for Judaica Provenance Research’ (with Julie-Marthe Cohen), in transfer – Journal for Provenance Research and the History of Collection (2023), and ‘Dealing with Germany and Reclaiming Jewish Ceremonial Objects: Guido Schönberger’s Postwar JCR Mission Reconsidered’, in Dubnow Institute Yearbook XIX (2023).

Kimberly Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow in Public History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is a historian of migration, modern Jewish history, and modern China. Previously, her research has been supported by the German Historical Institute Washington, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Natalie Eppelsheimer is an associate professor of German at Middlebury College. She is the author of Roads Less Traveled: German Jewish Exile Experiences in Kenya 1933–1947 (2019) and has numerous publications in the field of exile and refugee studies, language pedagogy and intercultural competence, and sustainability studies. Her current research projects focus on Holocaust refugees in colonial territories and German colonialism and its legacies.

Howard Falksohn is senior archivist at the Wiener Holocaust Library, London, where he has worked for the past 24 years preserving and making accessible donated archival collections as well as managing the records of the institution itself. In accordance with the library’s remit, he is especially keen to ensure that papers which document Jewish life in Europe before (as well as during) the Nazi era are brought to the attention of a wider public. He has published a number of articles in the journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees with that end in mind.

Lisa Gerlach is a historian with an interest in cultural history and a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Deutsch-jüdische Empfehlungsschreiben (1848–1945): Studien aus Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft zwischen sozialem Aufstieg und Vertreibung (2024). She conducted this study while holding fellowships at the German Historical Institute Washington and the University of Münster and a research fellowship at the Ruhr University Bochum.

Sandra Gruner-Domić is a sociocultural anthropologist and a Fulbright Foreign Scholar to Bolivia for the years 2022–2024. She was a Manya Friedman Memorial Fellow at the USHMM Mandel Center in 2023 and received the 2021 Bernard and Mollie Steuer / JDC Archives Fellowship. Her ongoing research projects focus on the narratives of Guatemalan genocide survivors and the migration of Holocaust survivors to Bolivia. Publications include ‘Guatemala: Del conflicto armado al genocidio’, in Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica 19–3, pp.75–80, and the book chapter ‘Colony vs. Refuge: Bolivia and its Jewish Migration’, in Daniela Gleizer, Emmanuel Kahan, and Yael Siman (eds.), The Holocaust and Latin America: Migration, Resettlement and Memory (currently under peer review).

Sarah Hagmann is a PhD student at the Basel Graduate School of History at the University of Basel. Her dissertation focuses on the Jewish aid organisation HIAS-HICEM and its manager Meyer Birman in Harbin and Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s.

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the interim director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (2009) and Taking the Transnational Turn: The German Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933–1943 (2023). His co-edited works include Beyond “Ordinary Men”: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography (with Jürgen Matthäus, 2019) and Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (with Wolf Gruner, 2020). His current research projects include a global history of the Holocaust, as well as protest movements and genocide language.

Simone Lässig is full professor of Modern History at Braunschweig University (on leave) and director of the German Historical Institute Washington. Her publications include Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und Sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (2004) and Refugee Crises, 1945–2000: Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison (co-edited with Jan Jansen, 2020). She is currently finishing a monograph on Coping with Disruptive Change: Jews, Middle Class Culture, and Social Transformation in the German Lands (1800–1860) and pursuing a book project on transnational families in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş is a postdoc fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington. In her current project, she explores the role of air routes in the history of refugee and asylum migration. Recent articles include ‘Im Drehkreuz. Konflikte um Asyl und Zurückweisungen am Frankfurter Flughafen (1980–1995)’, in Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 20/1 (2023) and ‘Mobilität/en und Mobilitätsgeschichte’ in Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte (2022).

Anna Norpoth is a researcher investigating the materiality of literary language, social revolutions, and cross-media history-telling. She has worked in the London literary sector and holds a PhD from Ruhr University Bochum. She is currently working on memory culture in the digital age at Körber-Stiftung, Hamburg. Her book Die Forderung des Werkes on Maurice Blanchot's concept of literature was published in 2022.

Caroline Rupprecht is professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde (2020), Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (2013), Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (2006), and translator of Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring (2000). Her current research focuses on the role of visual arts (architecture, sculpture, photography) to counter antisemitism and construct alternative Jewish identities in the writings of European authors, such as Peter Weiss, Anna Seghers, and Patrick Modiano.

Felix Steilen is postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. He is the author of Soziologie und Geschichtsphilosophie (2021) and co-editor of the Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History (2019) on Karl Löwith. His ongoing research centres on the secularisation of theological ideas and the material and intellectual legacy of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin.

Swen Steinberg teaches at the Department of History and the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and is an affiliated researcher at the German Historical Institute Washington. He is the editor of Migration und Zeitgeschichte (special issue of Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 2022). Other publications include Refugees from Nazi-Occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories (Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, co-edited with Anthony Grenville, 2020), and Knowledge and Young Migrants (special issue of KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, co-edited with Simone Lässig, 2019). His current research is focused on unaccompanied minor refugees, transit situations, and the creation of knowledge through migration.