Miranda Brethour

Professional Background

Miranda Brethour is a PhD candidate in history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research engages with the Holocaust in occupied Poland, in particular the regions of Sokołów, Węgrów, and Włodawa. Prior to beginning her doctorate, she received her master’s degree and honors bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Ottawa.

Brethour has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Holocaust Studies, The Journal of Historical Geography, and The Journal of Holocaust Research. Previously, she was a teaching fellow in the history department at Brooklyn College and worked on the intersection of Holocaust studies and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to examine Jewish survival strategies in the post-Aktionen period in Węgrów County.

Fellowship Research

Miranda Brethour was awarded an Alexander Grass Memorial Fellowship for her research project, “Violence, the Village Elder, and Daily Life in Interwar and Occupied Poland.” Her project traces the Holocaust in the countryside of the Lublin region as narrated through the relationship between Jewish residents, gentile villagers, and local village elders. Ms. Brethour’s research focuses on village elders as pivotal figures and probes into the social dynamics of small communities, the driving forces of inter-neighborhood violence, and the role of rural institutions in normalizing and legitimizing violence against the Jews during the Holocaust in Poland.

During her residency, she intends to use resources from the Claims Conference International Holocaust Documentation Archive. While researching the intricate aspects of Jewish-gentile relations in occupied Poland, Brethour employs various historical materials such as postwar court trials, police records, memoirs, diaries, oral histories, and administrative records created by the German occupation, as well as a wide range of regional materials concerning the Lublin countryside. Furthermore, she employs sources in multiple languages, including Polish, German, French, and English.

Residency Period: October 1, 2023-May 31, 2024