Education:

2018 - MA (North American Studies with the focus areas Cultural Studies and Political Science), Freie Universität Berlin

2015 - BA (English, North American Studies and Political Science), Universität Potsdam

Employment Career:

2019 - Researcher German Resistance Memorial Center Berlin; Freelancer at the Silent Hero Memorial Center and the Gedenkstätte Plötzensee Berlin

2018 - Research Assistant for Prof. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh, Emeritus) 

Awards, Fellowships and Grants:

2023 - John W. Kluge Center Fellowship of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA) and the Library of Congress

Summer Semester 2022

Undergraduate:

Shaping Transatlantic Memories, Leonie Werle, Mondays, 10:00-12:00

Research Focus 

Until today, the liberation of the concentration camps is of central importance to transatlantic relations. While the pictorial representations of the liberated camps in 1945 flooded a hitherto mostly unsuspecting U.S. society, soon after, the locations themselves were buried in oblivion across media outlets. Since 1950, the places gradually moved back into the focus of American politics and society. Victims' and interest groups campaigned to preserve the memory of these places and prevent forgetting the crimes, first memorials were erected and later transatlantic organizations got actively involved in the work of remembrance at the memorials. My research project investigates concentration camp memorials as sites of transatlantic commemoration practices since 1945. More specifically, the thematical focus lies on how U.S. actors engaged first with the concentration camp atrocities and then secondly with the memorial sites in the postwar period, and thereby lastingly influenced the U.S. memory of World War II. The work would like to follow up on more recent studies on the history of transatlantic relations and memory, but it also extends existing research on the history of memorials to include a much-needed transatlantic perspective.