Dr Svenja Bethke is Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Leicester and Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research explores European and Jewish history in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on material culture, nation building and everyday life.
She studied History, Political Science, Law and Eastern European Studies at the University of Hamburg, where she completed her PhD in 2014. Her doctoral research involved extensive archival work in Israel, Poland, Germany and the United States, supported by fellowships at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.
Before joining Leicester in 2016, she worked as a research associate at the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg and taught at the Universities of Hamburg, Frankfurt Oder and Heidelberg. Between 2019 and 2021, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship funded by the European Commission for her project Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building in the “Land of Israel”, based at the Avraham Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.