Elissa Mailänder Koslov

Elissa Mailänder Koslov has been a researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory since June 2008. In her post-doctoral project she will scrutinize the frames of reference for helping behavior by scrutinizing the agency of people who had hidden Jews in Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

She earned her Ph.D. in Historical Anthropology and Cultural History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of Erfurt (Germany). Her research project "Workaday Violence: Female Guards at Lublin-Majdanek (1942-1944)" examined the structures, mechanisms and dynamics of violence in this concentration- and extermination camp. The study reconstructed the career trajectories of twenty-eight female guards and further analyzed the social composition of the guard corps with a comparative perspective on the male camp guards, thereby filling a gap in the historical record concerning Nazi female perpetrators. The research was financed by scholarships from the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

In 2001 Elissa Mailänder Koslov was a Junior Visiting fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Vienna. In 2006, under a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship, she spent three months conducting archival research at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C. The author of several scholarly articles, she is also the co-editor of Lagersystem and Repräsentation: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager (Tübingen: Edition Diskord 2004).

Her specialized research interests are the history of perpetrators, bystanders and helpers; the study of everyday existence in Nazi concentration camps; gender history; and the history and theory of violence.