Mrs. Sarah Ehlers

Professional Background

Mrs. Sarah Ehlers is a PhD candidate in history at Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany).  She possesses skills in German, English, French, Spanish, and Dutch.  While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Mrs. Ehlers conducted research on her project “Tropical Medicine in Colonial Africa and Nazi Germany: Racial Imprints and Professional Networks.”

Mrs. Ehlers publications include: "Medical Missions and Racial Visions. Fighting Sleeping Sickness in Colonial Africa in the Early 20th Century” in Health and Difference: Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements (forthcoming); “Afrikanische Krankheit und europäische Körper: Kolonialärzte und die Schlafkrankheit 1900-1914,” in Europabilder im 20. Jahrhundert. Entstehung an der Peripherie, (Göttingen : Wallstein 2012); and “Europeanising Impacts from the Colonies: European Campaigns against Sleeping Sickness 1900-1914,” in Europeanisation in the 20th Century: the Historical Lens (Brussels: Peter Lang 2012).  Her presentations include the "Kolonialmedizin ohne Kolonien: Deutsche Tropenmedizin nach 1919," Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar: Twentieth-Century German History in Munich (2013), and "Ein europäisches Forschungsfeld? Koloniale Schlafkrankheitsbekämpfung in Afrika 1900-1950," Institute for Historical Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin (2012).

Fellowship Research

For her Joyce and Arthur Schechter Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center Advanced Holocaust Studies, Mrs. Ehlers furthered her scholarship on the continuities and ruptures between the German colonial period and the Nazi era, based on the examination of the records of the Klaus Schilling, Gerhard Rose, and other trials, and a multitude of primary sources, including the Natzweiler concentration camp records and the Henrietta Steiner papers.

Mrs. Sarah Ehlers was in residence at the Mandel Center from January 1 to March 31, 2015.