Lauren Ashley Bradford Awarded 2024-2025 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship
Lauren Ashley Bradford, PhD candidate in History at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, has been awarded the 2024-2025 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence in April 2025 as she conducts research for her dissertation, “Cloaked in Femininity: Women’s Participation in Racial Terror in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America.” In her research, she examines “Aryan” and white women’s roles as perpetrators of and active participants in mass atrocities, oppressive policies, and cultures of violence within two racist regimes — Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America.
The study of women perpetrators during the Holocaust and the Second World War typically focuses
on women serving as concentration camp guards. Bradford is focusing on the complexities of women’s roles outside the home or workspace. In her research, she examines public displays of violence, such as riots, lynchings, pogroms, public acts of humiliation, and communal acts of brutality, within these two distinct periods. During her time at the Center, Bradford plans to explore testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA), as well as materials in the Holocaust Studies Collection and Special Collections at USC Libraries, to see what they reveal about the process by which women came to exercise influence and power and ultimately became active participants in mass atrocities against persecuted minorities.
Bradford earned her B.A. in History and German Studies from Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, before going on to earn an M.A. in European History, Politics, and Society from Columbia University. Her MA research was on the dynamics between Germans, Jews, and the U.S. military in Berlin during the immediate post-Second World War period. At Gettysburg College, she was involved in researching, transcribing, and digitizing the Veis Family Letters Collection. Her work on this collection included creating teaching material, which supports Holocaust education at this institution.
Bradford has been awarded fellowships and awards from a variety of institutions and organizations, including from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She is a member of several organizations related to her research, such as the Association for Jewish Studies, Central European History Society, and the German Studies Association, among others.
The Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and related unique USC research resources. The fellowship enables the recipient to spend one month in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research during the academic year and to deliver a public lecture about his or her research. The fellowship is made possible through the generosity of Gerald Breslauer, Mickey Rutman, and Tammy Anderson. Learn more about past Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellows here.