Team

Christina Morina – Project Director

Christina Morina is since 2019 Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on major themes in modern and contemporary German and European history, especially World War II, the Holocaust and bystander history, political and memory cultures in Germany since 1945, the history of Marxism, and the history of historiography. Currently, she is writing a monograph entitled Tausend Aufbrüche. Die Deutschen und ihre Demokratie seit den 80er Jahren. Her dissertation was published as Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front War in Germany since 1945 (Cambridge 2011/paperback 2013). In 2017, she published her second monograph Die Erfindung des Marxismus. Wie eine Ideedie Welt eroberte (Munich, englisch edition Oxford 2022). She is also co-editor of Probing the Limits of Categorization. The Bystander in Holocaust History, New York 2018 (with K. Thijs), and co-author of Zur rechten Zeit. Wider die Rückkehr des Nationalismus, Berlin 2019 (with N. Frei, F. Maubach, M. Tändler).

Norbert Frei - Senior Project Advisor

Norbert Frei is Senior Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena, Germany, and director of the Jena Center of 20th Century History. He is a leading expert on the history, aftermath, and memory of National Socialism and World War II in Germany and Europe. Among his many publications are Der Führerstaat. Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft 1933–1945 (1987), Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (1996), 1945 und wir. Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen (2005) as well as Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (2010, with E. Conze, P. Hayes and M. Zimmermann). In Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History (eds. Christina Morina/Krijn, Berghahn Books 2019, p. 336), he stated: “[M]y overall impression […] is that it would be worthwhile to proceed more consistently toward a full-fledged historicization of the bystander. In order to get an even more comprehensive and realistic picture, it might be useful to further connect the appearance of the bystander as a social phenomenon under Nazism with its post factum invention as a historiographical figure.”

Roma Sendyka – Project Researcher

Roma Sendyka is since 2019 Professor in the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she is also Founding Director of the Research Center for Memory Cultures. Her research on memory studies, criticism and theory, and visual culture addresses relations between images, sites, and memory, and she is currently focused on "non-sites" of memory in Central and Eastern Europe and so-called "bystander" memory. She has worked as PI or co-investigator in projects founded by DFG/NCN, Volkswagen Stiftung, Erste Stiftung, EU Horizon 2020, NPRH Poland, SSHRC Canada. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, NIOD Amsterdam, and Humboldt University. She is co-curator of exhibitions relating to memory (most recently Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust, (2018-2019), with E. Lehrer, W. Wilczyk, M. Zych) and she is a member of the expert panel supporting the KL Plaszow Museum. She is co-author of three monographs and seven edited volumes on memory, and her most recent publication is the 2021 book Poza obozem. Nie-miejsca pamięci. Próba rozpoznania [Beyond Camps: Non-sites of Memory].

Anna Strommenger – Project Researcher

Anna Strommenger is research associate (postdoc) in the field of Contemporary History at Bielefeld University. As a member of the Balzan founded research group she is currently working on her second book project on Traveling Bystanders: ‘Outsiders’, Nazism and the Holocaust. Her research focuses on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Labor History with special attention to Imperial and Weimar Germany, and on the significance of “Heimat” for German History. In 2021, she completed her PhD thesis on socialist notions of “Heimat” in Imperial and Weimar Germany at the University of Duisburg-Essen with summa cum laude. The PhD thesis titled Zwischen Herkunft und Zukunft. ‚Heimat‘ in der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik was awarded the Friedrich-Ebert-Preis 2022 by the „Forschungsstelle Weimarer Republik“ (University of Jena) and the „Weimarer Republik e.V.“.
Among her recent publications are Neujustierung der herausgeforderten Zukunft. Sozialdemokratie 1918-1933 (2022, ed. Elke Seefried), and Friedrich Engels’ „Zur Wohnungsfrage“. Umstrittener Referenzpunkt der Arbeiterbewegung (2020, eds. Detlef Lehnert and Christina Morina).

Teresa Malice – Project Researcher

Teresa Malice is research associate (postdoc) in Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. Since 2020, she is working on her second book project about bystanding in the writings of “ordinary women” in Nazi Germany, Austria and Fascist Italy. In 2021, she was Senior Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.
She defended her dissertation (Transnational Imaginations of Socialism. Town Twinning and Local Government in ‘Red’ Italy and the GDR) in 2019 as a cotutelle between the Universities of Bologna and Bielefeld. She has been Visiting Fellow at Aarhus University (2018) and Start-Up Fellow at BGHS (2015). Between 2008 and 2013 she studied at the University of Bologna and at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Erasmus). Among her most recent publications, Il comunismo italiano nella storia del Novecento (2021, ed. Silvio Pons), and Storia del Pci in Emilia-Romagna. Welfare, lavoro, cultura, economie (1945-1991) (2022, ed. Carlo De Maria).

Laura Niewöhner – Project Researcher

Laura Maria Niewöhner is Research Assistant and PhD-Student at the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 „Practices of Comparing“ and is part of the project “INF | Datainfrastructure and Digital Humanities.” She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Sociology and a Master’s Degree in History from Bielefeld University. In her dissertation, she focuses on emotions and bystanding in US-American/ German denazification trials while using approaches of sentiment analysis. Moreover, she manages CRC’s study groups “AG text mining” and “AG Annotieren” where scholars examine and explore the use of digital methods for doing research on practices of comparing. Due to her research focus on contemporary history, she is member of the ZiF Cooperation Group “Normalizing the Far Right” located at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bielefeld.

tba - PhD Project: Legacies of Bystanding (Start-up Fellowship)

Part of the Balzan Prize funds will be used to support a prospective PhD thesis. It will comprise of €1500 per month for the duration of one year. The topic shall be situated well within the research objectives outlined above, and an at least partial focus on the political, social and cultural legacies of bystanding in the postwar era is required. A call for applications will be published in the fall of 2022.

Moritz Y. Meier – Student Research Assistant

Moritz Y. Meier is the student research assistant in this project and holds a Bachelor of Arts in History, Social Sciences and Educational Sciences. In his Bachelor's thesis, he critically researched German nationalism on the occasion of the 2006 Men's World Cup, taking into account political-economic interests as well as early 21st century social conditions in Germany. He is currently working on an exhibition project on the history of Herschel Grynszpan.