Kate Brackney is Assistant Professor of History at Leiden University. Her current research explores how aesthetic norms have developed for remembering the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. She teaches courses in modern European intellectual and cultural history. Before coming to Leiden, she taught at the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago and Harvard College's History & Literature Program. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

More information about Kate Brackney

Research

Dr. Brackney's forthcoming book, Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press), recovers a forgotten, surreal tradition of Holocaust representation that was particularly common before the 1980s and still influences how we imagine the Holocaust and link it to other catastrophes. To learn more, see her article, "Remembering Planet Auschwitz During the Cold War," in the journal Representations.

Selected publications

“New Shapes of Holocaust Memory in the Anthropocene,” Environment, Space, Place, a journal published by the University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming 2023).

“Beyond Bearing Witness: A. Sutzkever’s Surreal Griner akvaryum,” S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation 7, a journal published by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (2020).

Kathryn Brackney and Terence Renaud, “What Hannah Arendt Would Do About Trump’s Former Bureaucrats,” Foreign Policy (23 December 2020).

“When Memory Speaks, How Should We Listen?” Review of Hannah Pollin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) for In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (8 July 2019).

“Remembering ‘Planet Auschwitz’ during the Cold War,” Representations 144 (Fall 2018).