“Fear and Loathing in the Rhineland: The Social Life of Antisemitism in Alsace and Lorraine, 1933-1940”
Professional Background
Dr. Erin Corber was an international fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at New Europe College in Bucharest (Romania) in 2015-16, and previously Visiting Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Maine, Orono. She received her PhD in History from the University of Indiana, Bloomington in 2013. She has language skills in English, French, German, and Hebrew. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Corber will work on her project, “Fear and Loathing in the Rhineland: The Social Life of Antisemitism in Alsace and Lorraine, 1933-1940”.
Dr. Corber has written a number of publications, including “La Marseillaise and the Mob: Re/Deconstructing Antisemitism and Protest at the University of Strasbourg, 1937,” in The New Europe College Yearbook (forthcoming, 2017), “The Kids on Oberlin Street: Space, Place, and Jewish Community in Late Interwar Strasbourg,” in Urban History (October, 2015), and “Men of Thought, Men of Action: the Great War, Masculinity, and the Modernization of the French Rabbinate,” in Jewish Culture and History vol 14 no 1 (April, 2013). She is also the distinguished winner of a number of awards, including a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), as well as the William B. Cohen Memorial Award in European History at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Fellowship Research
For her Lydia and David Zimmern Memorial Fellowship at the Mandel Center, Dr. Corber looked at previously unexamined sources like police surveillance, local press, oral histories, and merchants’ organization correspondence, and provincial Jewish communal records to show that French antisemitism had roots in local settings outside the capital, and that it developed through everyday social interactions in very ordinary settings. This study, then, sought to elucidate the history of antisemitism both before and during the Second World War.
Dr. Erin Corber was in residence at the Mandel Center until January 31, 2017.