Alexandra Garbarini Assistant Professor of History Ph.D. (2003) University of California at Los Angeles M.A. (1997) University of California at Los Angeles B.A. (1994) Williams College

Contact Information
NAB Room 314
Phone: 413.597.2528
Alexandra.Garbarini@williams.edu
Office Hours: Friday 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm and by appointment

Biography
Alexandra Garbarini received her B.A. from Williams College in 1994 and completed her doctorate in 2003 in the department of history at University of California at Los Angeles, writing a dissertation under the supervision of Saul Friedländer. Her first book, Numbered Days: Diary Writing and the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2006) was a runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category, and is the first sustained analysis by a historian of the significant ways in which European Jewish wartime diaries contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust. Drawing on an array of unpublished and published diaries from all over German-occupied Europe, Garbarini analyzes the role of diary writing within ordinary men and women's larger struggles to cope with the unimaginable genocide as it unfolded around them. She is currently at work on a study of interwar European cultural and legal responses to mass atrocity and political violence, and their legacy for post-World War II international law and the concept of human rights.

Since the spring of 2003 she has taught at Williams College, where she offers courses on the history of the Holocaust, European Jewish history, and modern European cultural and political history.

Courses Taught
HIST 136: Before the Deluge: Paris and Berlin in the Interwar Years
HIST 228: Europe in the Twentieth Century
HIST 230: Modern European Jewish History
HIST 239: Modern German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1871-1990
HIST 338: The History of the Holocaust
HIST 430: Toward a History of the Self in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe
HIST 482T: Memory, History, and Extermination of the Jews of Europe
HIST 10: The Justice of Violence
HIST 12: The Unremembered Genocide: The Armenian Genocide

 

Selected Publications

Books: Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
*Finalist for the 2006 National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category

Articles, Review Essays, Encyclopedia Entries: "A Tale of Two Diarists: A Comparative Examination of Experiences in Eastern and Western Europe," in the occasional paper Ghettos 1939-1945: New Research and Perspectives on Definition, Daily Life, and Survival, United States Holocaust Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (2005).

"Redemptive Possibilities of Holocaust Remembrance," Jewish Quarterly Review 97: 2 (2007): 304-313

"Holocaust Diaries," in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)

Research Interests
Modern Jewish History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History

 

Theses Advised
Mark Esposito (2005) Rex vaincra! Léon Degrelle and the Failure of the Rexist Movement
Kimberly Gilbert (2006) History's Shadow: Holocaust Remembrance in the Berlin Republic, 1990-2005
Emily Bruce (2007) 'These innocent tales': Family and Nation in the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen
Brian Van Wyck (2007) Paranoia and Policy: Otto von Bismarck and Russo-Germans Relations, 1875-1881

 

 

Program Connections at Williams
Jewish Studies

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