Lauren Fedewa

PhD Program (She/Her)
lauren.fedewa@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Conflict, Violence and Genocide
  • Europe
  • Gender, Sex, and Sexualities

Areas of Interest

Holocaust and genocide studies, modern Europe, modern Jewish history, social history

Major and Minor Fields

Major

  • Modern Europe

Minor 1

Modern Jewish History

Minor 2

History of Conflict, Violence, and Genocide

Working Dissertation

Title

'Always One Step Away from Death, and Always Afraid’: Jewish Women who ‘Passed’ as Polish-Christian Forced Laborers in Germany

Supervisors

Doris Bergen

Description

Lauren is currently working on her dissertation tentatively titled “‘Always One Step Away from Death, and Always Afraid’: Jewish Women who ‘Passed’ as Polish-Christian Forced Laborers in Germany during the Holocaust." Lauren’s dissertation challenges the tendency to treat Polish, German, and Jewish histories of the Holocaust and war as separate from one another by constructing an integrated history around the phenomenon of passing. It will illuminate the experience and implications of passing to the study of the Holocaust, foregrounding passing as not only an individual act but a performance involving actors, supporting actors, and audience. In particular, this work focuses on the ways in which the experience of Jewish women passers, Polish-Christian and Ukrainian forced laborers, and German employers, workers, and officials intersected in German factories, households, and on farms.

Biography

Lauren Fedewa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Lauren earned a B.A. in History and Germanic Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015 and an M.A. in History from the University of Vermont in 2018. Her master’s thesis, written under the guidance of Prof. Jonathan Huener and other professors affiliated with the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, is titled “Between Extermination and Child-Rearing: The Foreign Child-Care Facilities of Volkswagen and Velpke” (2018). Lauren holds a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies (2023-2024) and has been the recipient of several other fellowships and awards, including a visiting fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (2022), the HEFNU Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization (2022), a U.S. Fulbright Student Research Grant (2018), the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Summer Graduate Research Assistantship (2017), the Connaught International Scholarship for Doctoral Students at the University of Toronto (2019-2024), and the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship (2017). As a research contractor for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center, Lauren researched and wrote encyclopedia entries on sites of persecution for infants born to Polish and Soviet forced laborers in Germany, which will be published in Volume IV of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 (forthcoming).

Awards

Education

MA, University of Vermont (2018)
BA, University of Maryland (2015)

Cohort

  • 2019-2020