Dr. Wendy Lower, the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, has earned accolades for her latest book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. She will talk about the topic at 4 p.m. Sunday as part of the Burton C. Einspruch Lecture Series.
Dr. Wendy Lower, the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, will present two lectures Sunday and Monday for the annual Burton C. Einspruch Lecture Series, which is hosted by the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at UT Dallas.
Lower’s first lecture, at 4 p.m. Sunday, is titled after her most recent book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. At 9 a.m. Monday, she will talk about “Traitors to the Homeland: Nazi Collaborators and Soviet Trials in Ukraine.”
“Inviting the most distinguished scholars and writers in the field of Holocaust Studies, our annually held Einspruch Lecture Series is among the most important academic programs of the University,” said Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, who holds the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies. “Dr. Wendy Lower has become world famous after her first book, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, which was followed by a number of new ones, among them, her latest — a widely celebrated text that is one of the first studies of its kind.”
Lower has published widely in the field of Holocaust studies, and Hitler’s Furies has received praise for its pioneering work in the study of women perpetrators of the Holocaust.
“Hitler’s Furies focuses on the transformations of individual women in the inner workings and outer landscapes of the Holocaust — in the offices, among the occupational elite, in the killing fields. Often those who seemed the least likely to perpetrate the Holocaust’s horrors became the most entangled and involved,” Lower wrote in her book. “The consensus in Holocaust and genocide studies is that the systems that make mass murder possible would not function without the broad participation of society, and yet nearly all histories of the Holocaust leave out half of those who populated that society, as if women’s history happens somewhere else.”
Both lectures will take place in the Alexander Clark Center. They are free and open to the public.
In addition to her position at Claremont McKenna College, Lower serves as a research associate at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. A historical consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she has published numerous articles and books on the Holocaust and conducted archival research and fieldwork in Central and Eastern Europe since 1992.
Hitler’s Furies was a 2013 National Book Award Finalist.
For more information about the lectures, call (972) 883-2100 or email holocauststudies@utdallas.edu.
The endowment of the Burton C. Einspruch Holocaust Lecture Series sponsors annual lectures and is part of the Holocaust Studies Program in the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas. It brings world-famous scholars in the field of Holocaust research to the UT Dallas campus where they share and discuss their latest findings with general audiences as well as with students and faculty. The series’ purpose is to help others understand the crisis the Holocaust created in the world and to study its relevance and meaning for humanity in the 21st century.