Arizona State University
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Duration of Stay: November 2025 | Visiting Fellow based at the Graduate School, Landshuter Str. 4
Talk: 13 November 2025, 14:15, Room 017 AlFi | Setting Up Shop in the House of the Hangman: Jewish Economic Life in Postwar Germany

Anna Holian is Associate Professor of at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizon State University. She is a cultural and social historian of twentieth-century Europe, specializing in Germany and the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. She received her Ph.D. in History with distinction from the University of Chicago in 2005, after earning her M.A. (1997) and B.A. with honors (1990) there as well. Her research focuses on migration, displacement, urban life, and cultural representations of postwar Europe, often with a comparative and transnational approach.

Her first book, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, explores how Eastern European refugees in Germany defined themselves in the aftermath of the war, shaping distinct political communities through their experiences of both Nazi and Soviet power.

She is currently at work on Setting Up Shop in the House of the Hangman: Jewish Economic Life in Postwar Germany, which examines how Jewish survivors built livelihoods and communities in Germany after 1945, challenging the notion that they were merely sojourners, or temporary residents who were prepared to leave, and abandon their businesses, at the earliest opportunity. This project will be the subject of her talk in Regensburg on 13 November at 14:15 as part of the colloquium series.

Her second ongoing project, Europe’s War Children: A Cinematic History, investigates how filmmakers and cultural debates addressed the challenges posed by war children in postwar Europe. Anna Holian has also contributed to the collaborative project Geographies of the Holocaust, co-authoring a study on flight and deportation in Italy using spatial analysis. The results appeared in Geographies of the Holocaust, edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Indiana University Press, 2014).

Her work has been supported by the NEH, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, DAAD, and the German Historical Institutes, among others. She teaches courses on modern German history, the Holocaust, fascism, migration, post-1945 Europe, and history and film.

She is co-supervisor of Regensburg doctoral researcher Sarah Grandke.