Buried in the Archive:
Researching Women’s Public Violence
in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America

April 16, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Verna and Peter Dauterive Hall (VPD), Room 203
Join us in person or on Zoom

A public lecture by Lauren Ashley Bradford (PhD candidate in History, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University)
2024-2025 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

(Join us in person or online on Zoom)

In her doctoral research, Lauren Ashley Bradford is exploring women’s participation in racially motivated public violence across Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. Moving beyond traditional historical narratives that have confined women to domestic or institutional roles, her work examines how women actively engaged in public displays of racial terror that helped maintain systems of oppression. By analyzing survivor testimonies, court records, institutional reports, and newspaper accounts from both contexts, Bradford reveals how women transformed everyday spaces – from city streets to rural communities – into sites of racial persecution.

During her residency at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, she will examine how Jewish survivors describe and remember encounters with women perpetrators during the Nazi period. Through analysis of Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies, she will investigate both everyday incidents of antisemitic harassment and larger episodes of communal violence like the November Pogrom, focusing specifically on women’s roles in these events. Her research will analyze patterns in the ways survivors describe these encounters, paying particular attention to the locations where violence occurred, the types of actions women took, and the gendered language used in recounting these experiences.

In this talk, Bradford will discuss the methodological challenges and unexpected discoveries encountered while conducting this research. She will share how she navigates the difficulties of locating women’s actions in historical archives, particularly when searching for women’s narratives and the historically marginalized voices of Jewish and Black communities. She will highlight how survivor and eyewitness testimonies provide crucial perspectives that official documents often fail to capture, offering insights into the lived experience of those targeted by this violence.

REGISTER HERE

Lunch will be served.

Lauren Ashley Bradford is a Ph.D. candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her dissertation is entitled “‘With Blood on Their Stockings’: Women’s Public Participation in Racial Terror in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America.” Bradford’s research on women’s participation in racial terror integrates perpetrator records with survivor testimonies to understand both the mechanics of violence and its impact on targeted communities. She has conducted extensive archival research throughout Germany, the UK, and the United States, supported by fellowships including a DAAD One-Year Doctoral Research Grant, an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship, a Tauber Institute Graduate Research Grant, and a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship. Bradford holds a BA in History and German Studies from Gettysburg College and an MA in European History, Politics, and Society from Columbia University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of gender and race, with a specific focus on individual and communal violence in regimes of racial terror.

Lecture image above:
Marburg, 19 August 1933
Stadtarchiv Marburg, S 3/4, Nr 156
Archiv Stabsstelle Presse und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Universitätsstadt Marburg

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