The Wiener Holocaust Library

Lauren Ashley Bradford is a Doctoral Candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She holds a BA in History and German Studies from Gettysburg College and an MA in European History, Politics, and Society from Columbia University. Bradford’s dissertation research is a comparative project that focuses on white and “Aryan” women who openly participated in public displays of violence in Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany. She centers her research around certain public settings and acts of violence, such as riots, lynchings, and pogroms, and works to compliment previous studies that have focused on the careers or family life of women perpetrators. Women’s involvement took many forms, with varying degrees of severity, but the responses to their choices and actions are crucial to understanding the complex relational dynamics between victims and perpetrators and, additionally, the ways in which these dynamics were compounded by gender.