Dr. Robert M. Ehrenreich

Dr. Ehrenreich, who joined the Museum in 1999, heads its National Academic Programs, which promote understanding of the Holocaust across North America through multidisciplinary research, teaching, scholarly forums, and publications. Programs include seminars for professors of college-level Holocaust courses and several types of regional campus outreach events in partnership with colleges and universities.

Dr. Ehrenreich’s current research focuses on the material culture of the Holocaust, the study of the things that people created, hid, obtained, and repaired to provide insights into their lives and this history. He has also worked on representation and the Holocaust as well as the perpetrator-victim-bystander constellation. He is coediting a forthcoming book, The Material Culture of Difficult Histories, and contributing a chapter, “Talisman, Trophy, or Testament: Holocaust-Era Mica from the Theresienstadt Glimmerwerke.”

Prior to joining the Museum, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution; a research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana; a senior staff scientist at The National Academies; and an associate research professor at George Washington University.  

Dr. Ehrenreich serves on the Board of Directors of the Ultimate History Project, an e-journal, and as an advisor to the WAVE Trauma Centre in Northern Ireland. He was previously an External Examiner for Queen’s University, Belfast.

Education

• DPhil, archaeology, Keble College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, 1985
• AB, anthropology and archaeology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982

Languages

• English

Select Publications

• “Value in Context: Material Culture and Treblinka,” coauthored with Caroline Sturdy Colls, Current Anthropology (2021)
• “War in Context: Let the Artifacts Speak,” coauthor (2012)
• After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, coeditor (2009)
• “The Perpetrator-Bystander-Victim Constellation: Rethinking Genocidal Relationships,” coauthor, (2005)

Select Presentations and Interviews

• “A Mica Flake from Theresienstadt”. Episode for the EHRI Podcast Series, For the Living and the Dead: Traces of the Holocaust, October 22, 2022.
• “Upcycling Scarce Resources in the Nazi Camp Universe”. Presented with Margaret Mariani at the conference on Crafting Identities: Handicraft Programmes in Times of War, Genocide and their Aftermaths, c. 1890–1950, Holocaust Centre North, University of Huddersfield, UK. September 13-14, 2022
• “Viewing the Holocaust through Objects,” November 2020 digital presentation for a Holocaust Education Month program by Carleton University’s Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship, Ottawa, Canada
• “Bringing Together the Digital with Research, Teaching, and Conservation,” July 2020 co-presentation at virtual Twin Talks Workshop 3: Understanding and Facilitating Collaboration in Digital Humanities, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ DH2020 conference