Professor Atina Grossmann Named the 2024-2025 Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Atina Grossmann, Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union in New York City, will serve as the 2024-2025 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will spend over a week in residence at the Center in April and will deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture entitled “Jewish Refugees in the Global South: New Approaches to Global Transit in the 1930s and 1940s” on April 21, 2025.

“We are very honored to welcome Atina Grossmann, an internationally distinguished Holocaust scholar, as this year’s Shapiro Scholar in Residence,” said Center Founding Director, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, and Professor of History Wolf Gruner. “Her research opened new ways of thinking about gender in German history as well as about the experiences of Jews in Postwar Germany and of Jewish Holocaust refugees in the Global South.”

Grossman is the author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton University Press, 2007, German 2012), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (Jena, 2012), and Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (Oxford University Press 1995). She has co-authored or co-edited five books, including Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with Mark Edele and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Wayne State University Press 2017), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (with Rita Chin, Heidi Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, University of Michigan Press 2009), Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (with Omer Bartov and Mary Nolan, New Press 2002), and When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (with Renate Bridenthal and Marion Kaplan, Monthly Review Press, 1984). A prolific writer, she has authored articles and book chapters in the last few years on Jewish refugees in Iran and India, Holocaust Studies in our age of catastrophe, writing about women and the Holocaust, among a myriad of other topics. She was part of an illuminating conversation on gender, sexuality, and sexual violence during the Holocaust that appeared in the Journal of Holocaust Research in 2024.

Among her many contributions as a public historian, Grossmann served as the co-editor and historical consultant for Unser Mut/Our Courage: Juden in Europa/Jews in Europe 1945-1948 (2021), an exhibit at Jewish Museum Frankfurt that traveled to other European cities.

Grossmann is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Historical Review and the Editorial Advisory Board of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is also a member of the Scholars Advisory Board of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Battery Park, NYC. She has held visiting professorships at several institutions, including University of Haifa, Humboldt University in Berlin, and Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

Grossmann has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout her illustrious career, including the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library, London, both for her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, German, Wallstein 2012). She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Academy in Berlin, German Marshall Fund, Institute for Advanced Study, Davis Center at Princeton University, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Intended to inspire prominent scholars, the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund was established through a gift by longtime USC Shoah Foundation Executive Committee and Board of Councilors member Mickey Shapiro. The fund enables one senior scholar to spend time in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. This prestigious fellowship for luminaries in the field of Holocaust Studies is available through invitation only.

The fellowship offers senior scholars the opportunity to use the unique Holocaust and genocide research resources at USC, including the Holocaust and Genocide Studies book collection, archival collections in Special Collections, and the Visual History Archive, which contains more than 57,000 testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, including the testimony of Sara Shapiro.

Grossmann is the ninth Shapiro Scholar in Residence, following previous Shapiro Scholars Dan Stone (2023-2024), Jan Grabowski (2022-2023), Sara R. Horowitz (2020-2021), Peter Hayes (2019-2020), Marion Kaplan (2018-2019), Christopher R. Browning (2017-2018), Omer Bartov (2016-2017), and inaugural Shapiro Scholar David Cesarani (2015-2016).