Dr. Kathryn Sederberg

Professional Background

Dr. Kathryn Sederberg is the Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Associate Professor of German Studies at Kalamazoo College, Michigan. Her main research areas include twentieth-century German culture, autobiography and memoir, war and gender, and National Socialism and its legacies. She has published on diaries and literature from the Second World War and the postwar period. In 2022, Dr. Sederberg received a Certificate of Merit from the Goethe-Institut and the American Association of Teachers of German. She was a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research in London in 2022 and a 2023 Joint USHMM-ZfHS Fellow in Munich at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History. Dr. Sederberg is also active in the field of language pedagogy and has published content-based language instruction, teaching with museums, and curriculum development with a literacies approach.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Kathryn Sederberg was awarded the Kurt and Thea Sonnenmark Memorial Fellowship for her study of refugee diaries, “Writing Home: Refugee Diaries of German and Austrian Jews, 1933-1945.” This monograph considers the practice of diary writing during emigration and exile, and the changes in writing and its functions as the author is geographically displaced. Beyond giving an account of the history of emigration, the diary became a part of constructing a new self as a refugee in transit and in exile, and as a survivor. The diary was often part of daily life for refugees: a site (a physical space and cultural practice)where writers document their search for a new life, and an instrument for interpreting and life as a refugee. With a focus on Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria, the book traces how these narratives give an account of the trauma of forced displacement and new beginnings in a strange country, where processes of acculturation and new concepts of self, home, and belonging shape the writing subject.

During her residency, Dr. Sederberg will use the Museum's collections of diaries written by Jewish refugees of all ages and backgrounds who fled Nazi persecution. These diaries come in various forms, ranging from dated, serial texts written in notebooks, to bound diaries, to simple, loose-leaf papers. This unique collection of first-person accounts helps us better understand experiences of displacement and how diaries served as a tool of agency and self-construction that enabled writers to work through their experiences and questions of self-identity.

Residency Period: June 1–July 31, 2024