Rebekka Grossmann is an Assistant Professor of Migration History. Her research and teaching center on the history of minority cultures.

More information about Rebekka Grossmann

Fields of interest

Migration, Jewish History, Visual Culture, Photography, Global Media and Communication, History of Nationalism 

Research

As a historian of migration history Rebekka Grossmann approaches the question of how patterns of mobility shaped encounters between minorities and majority cultures, placing special emphasis on the analytical lens of visual culture. Her first monograph, Unsettled Cameras: Photography, Mobility, and Nation in Jewish History, 1918-1948, currently under review for publication, locates photography in the study of Jewish nationalism. It argues that international visual culture shaped by migratory mobility and media globalization actively influenced the thinking about modern Jewish belonging. Rebekka Grossmann is also involved in a project that studies the history of Jewish vernacular photography in Nazi Germany. Titled Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany the co-authored monograph is forthcoming with Pennsylvania University Press. She is currently developing a new monograph project on the history of migrant contributions to humanitarian photography. The planned project complements transnational approaches to Jewish political history with a global history angle to ask how forced and voluntary Jewish mobility informed the history of humanitarianism. 

Grants and awards

• 2023-2026 (Declined) Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Mandel Scholion Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• 2023-2024 (Declined) The Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• 2021-2023 Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Postdoctoral Advisors: Dan Diner, Iris Nachum)
• 2021-2024 (Declined) Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, UCL London
• 2021-2022 (Declined) Guest professorship for Israel Studies, Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam
• 2021-2022 (Declined) Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University
• July 2021 Guest Fellowship, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF), Potsdam
• 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• 2020 The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award, Columbia University and Fordham University
• 2020 AJS Professional Young Scholars Development Grant
• 2019- 2020 Binational Visiting Fellowship in the History of Migration at the German Historical Institute, Pacific Office, University of California, Berkeley
• 2018 The Gertrude Barber Halpern Young Scholars Award, The Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• 2017-2018 Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme, Leo Baeck Institute, London & Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes
• 2014-2019 George L. Mosse Program in History, University of Wisconsin-Madison & The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• 2017 Leo Baeck Institute Dissertation Prize, Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem
• 2016 Conference Travel Grant of the Hebrew University
• 2016 Yad Vashem Dissertation Prize, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

CV

Rebekka Grossmann obtained her Ph.D. in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020. In 2019/20 she was a fellow of the Binational Visiting Tandem Program in the History of Migration at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020/21 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University and between 2021 and 2023 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University. She received her M.Phil from the University of Oxford and her BA from the University of Freiburg. 

Selected publications

2023 “Photography between Empire and Nation: German-Jewish Displacement and the Global Camera,” Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination, eds. Skye Doney and Darcy Buerkle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), 234-252.

2023 “Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 16, no. 2, 203-227.

2021 “The ‘Colonial’ Vantage Point: Imperial Photography in Mandate Palestine,” Israel Studies 26, no. 3 (2021), 158-178.

2019 “Image Transfer and Visual Friction. Staging Palestine in the National Socialist Spectacle,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 64, no. 1 (2019), 19-45.

2018 “Negotiating Presences. Palestine and the Weimar German Gaze,” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 2 (2018), 137-172.