DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Biography

Anna is a PhD student in the Department of History at Northwestern and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Jewish Studies. She researches the history of the Holocaust in Austria and Jewish history in Austria after the Second World War with a specific emphasis on Vienna. Anna received her B.A. in British and American Studies with a minor in History from Bielefeld University. She graduated with her M.A. in History from Missouri State University, where she also worked as a graduate assistant in the History department. Her M.A. thesis examined acts of revenge and revenge fantasies of Jewish Holocaust survivors in postwar Vienna. In 2024 her thesis was awarded the Missouri State University Distinguished Thesis Award in the Humanities category. Anna is also interested in Austrofascism and memory politics after 1945. Her essay “The 1931 Biatorbágh Train Attack as an Example of the Political Polarization of Austrian Newspapers in the Interwar Period” won the Journal of Austrian Studies Graduate Student Essay Award in 2024. For the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, she wrote an article on the critical engagement with memory politics for zeitgeschichte|online. In 2025, she contributed an article on the life of the Jewish art historian Hilde Zaloscer to the [Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora project at the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam.

Although not from the Chicago area, Anna is a fan of the Chicago Bears.