Christin Zühlke is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She is assisting (together with McKenna Marko and Diane Otosaka) Stuart Taberner and Erin McGlothlin with the project “Rethinking Holocaust Literature: Contexts, Canons, Circulations” funded by United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council. This project entails the undertaking of a large-scale, thorough examination of Holocaust literature by an international team of more than 40 scholars.
Christin’s research focuses on Jewish experiences and responses to the Holocaust, with a specific emphasis on gender (masculinities) and religious aspects. In her postdoctoral research, she comprehensively studies Jewish masculinities in Elie Wiesel's writings. She holds a Ph.D. from the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Her Ph.D. project focused on the Yiddish writings of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau with an approach to Jewish Cultural Studies and Jewish as well as Holocaust Literature.
Christin co-published 2023 New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust and 2022 Die Nacht, a new, annotated German translation of La Nuit by Elie Wiesel with the Elie Wiesel Research Center. She is an Associate Co-Editor of the Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature (with Erin McGlothlin, McKenna Marko, Diane Otosaka, and Stuart Taberner) and co-edits New Approaches to Teaching Holocaust Literature (with Erin McGlothlin and McKenna Marko). She co-edits the Elie Wiesel Research Series as well as the annotated 24-volume edition Elie Wiesel Werke (Works of Elie Wiesel.) She is also co-editing the special issue “Agency and Absence. Zooming in on Men as Gendered Beings during the Holocaust” (with Björn Krondorfer) for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the special issue “In the Void – (Non-)Representations of the Gas Chambers” (with Dominic Williams) for Holocaust Studies.
Christin is teaching classes such as “Representation and Memory in St. Louis Museums” and “Yidishkayt. Yiddish Literature in English Translation”. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, the University of California, Berkeley, and the German Historical Institute (Pacific Regional Office in Berkeley). Throughout the academic year 2024–25, she is a Yiddish Pedagogy Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. She worked in several museums and memorials, such as Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany, and Yad Vashem, Israel.
Christin's publications include:
“‘Shultsloze Ferpeynikte Neshomes’ – ‘Vulnerable, Tormented Souls’: Gendered Wounds, Sexualized Violence, and Jewish Masculinity in the Yiddish Testimonies of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau”, in: The Journal of Holocaust Research (Special issue: Gender-Based and Sexual Violence during the Holocaust), 19p.
“Elie Wiesel and A Legacy of (Post-)Witnessing”, in: Modern Judaism, 16p.
“More than Meets the Eye – The Intricate Relationship between Selfies at Holocaust Memorial Sites and their Subsequent Shaming”, in: Eastern European Holocaust Studies, co-authored with Samantha Hinckley, 18p.
“Religious Aspects of the Testimonies of the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz-Birkenau” in: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte [Journal for the History of Religion and Intellectual History] (74.2), 174-178 (German)