Team

Mary Fulbrook – Professor of German History, Principal Investigator

Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History at University College London (UCL). Fulbrook’s most recent research has focussed on Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023). Her many other books include Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (OUP, 2018), winner of the 2019 Wolfson History Prize; and the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (OUP, 2012). Her previous monographs have covered a range of topics, including particularly the social history of the GDR, questions of national identity after the Holocaust, and key theoretical issues in historiography, as well as general histories of Germany, and a number of edited collections on German and European history. Among other commitments, Mary Fulbrook has served as Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences; as Chair of the British Academy Modern History Section; and as Chair of the German History Society, as well as being founding Joint Editor of its journal, German History. She is currently, inter alia, a member of the Editorial Board of Yad Vashem Studies; the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM); and the Academic Advisory Board of the Memorial Foundation for the former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.

Christina Morina – Professor of Contemporary History, Principal Investigator

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. Her dissertation was published as Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front War in Germany since 1945 (Cambridge 2011/paperback 2013: CUP). In 2017, she published her second monograph Die Erfindung des Marxismus. Wie eine Idee die Welt eroberte (Munich: Siedler, English edition Oxford: OUP, 2022). She is also co-editor of Probing the Limits of Categorization. The Bystander in Holocaust History, New York: Berghahn, 2018 (with K. Thijs), and co-author of Zur rechten Zeit. Wider die Rückkehr des Nationalismus, Berlin: Ullstein, 2019 (with N. Frei, F. Maubach, M. Tändler). In 2023, she published her latest monograph: Tausend Aufbrüche. Die Deutschen und ihre Demokratie seit den 80er Jahren (Munich: Siedler).

Gaëlle Fisher – Research Fellow, Project Researcher

Gaëlle Fisher is a research associate (postdoc) in Contemporary History at Bielefeld University. She is a historian of modern Germany and Europe focusing on the history and aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II. In her current work, she is particularly interested in Jewish responses to persecution and Jewish / non-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust in different European societies (primarily Romania and France). From 2017 to 2023 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. In 2015-2016 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Augsburg. She has taught at universities in London, Augsburg and Leipzig and holds a PhD in History from University College London (2015). In the context of the project “Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage and Compliance in and beyond the Holocaust,” she is conducting research on the topic of help for Jews and Jewish self-help during the Holocaust in Romania and France. This research builds on her earlier work on the history of the Holocaust in Romania and the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II among German-speakers from the region of Bukovina. Her most recent publications include “A Nazi Rescuer? Fritz Schellhorn and the Contested History of the Holocaust in Romania,” in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2022); „Geschichtsschreibung und Rechtsprechung: Martin Broszat und die Entschädigung Überlebender des Holocaust aus Rumänien, 1955–1965“, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 70, no. 2 (2022); and Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945-1989 (Berghahn Books, 2020). She is also co-editor together with Caroline Mezger of The Holocaust in the Borderlands: Interethnic Relations and the Dynamics of Violence in Occupied Eastern Europe, European Holocaust Studies Vol. 2 (Wallstein, 2019).

Margaret Comer – Research Fellow, Project Researcher

Margaret Comer is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Margaret’s research focuses on the heritage of mass repression, Soviet and post-Soviet memorialization and heritagization, Holocaust memorialization and heritagization, grievability and memory, and contested memory. She is specifically interested in how post-repression societies variously portray violence, suffering, perpetration, bystanding and victimhood at sites associated with mass violence. Her research interests also include preservation and tourism at sites of mass repression, materiality and memorialization, and heritage and climate change. From 2020 to 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Research Council-funded project “Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena”, based at Tallinn University (grant agreement no 853385). In 2019-20, she was the Research Assistant on ‘Safeguarding Sites: The IHRA Charter for Best Practice’, an interdisciplinary project funded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This ongoing project aims to identify types of risk that threaten the preservation of Holocaust sites and then draft ‘best practices’ guidelines to protect them. She remains involved with the project, which will run through 2024. Her PhD (2015-19), undertaken at the University of Cambridge, was funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust. She has published articles in Memory Studies, International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Nordic Journal of Human Rights, as well as several peer-reviewed book chapters. She is currently finalizing a monograph based on her PhD thesis, ‘The Heritage of Repression: Memory, Commemoration, and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia’.

Lena Obermann – Student Research Assistant

Lena Obermann is a student research assistant in this project. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science. In her Bachelor's thesis, she analysed the role of NATO-Russia relations in the framework of the Ukraine conflict, investigating differing responsibilities in this context. Recently, her research turned towards the Friedrich Kellner diaries and the question of guilt and resistance under National Socialism, especially in relationship to the role of the “majority society”.