Dr. Tarik Cyril Amar

Professional Background

Dr. Tarik Cyril Amar received a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University; a Masters in history from the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a B.A. in history from Oxford University. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was a former Shklar Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and had accepted the position of Academic Director of the Lviv Center for Urban History of East Central Europe. For his Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Dr. Amar researched and wrote about “The Holocaust and the Making of Soviet Lviv.”

Dr. Amar was a Petro Jacyk Visiting Scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Harriman Institute and the History Department of Columbia University. He has worked on a collaborative research project titled “Middle Town Ukraine: Fifteen Years of Change in Local Perspective,” for which he conducted sociological interviews across Ukraine. He has published several articles and papers about his work including most recently “Yom Kippur in Lviv: The Lviv Synagogue and the Soviet Party-State, 1944-1962,” East European Jewish Affairs, 35:1 (2005). Dr. Amar has also presented his work at several international conferences. He works in several languages including English, German, French, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish.

Fellowship Research

During his fellowship, Dr. Amar researched and wrote about the effect of the Holocaust on the wartime and postwar history of the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine (formerly also Lvov in the Soviet Union, Lwów in Poland, Lemberg in the Habsburg Empire). As part of this study Dr. Amar examined the behavior of bystanders as well as local perpetrators. He focused his examination not only on the German occupation period of the city but also beyond. Dr. Amar also researched non-German gentile responses to the Holocaust in Lviv and addressed the issue of collaboration by the Ukrainian Police during the Holocaust.

Dr. Amar was in residence at the Mandel Center from June 1 to July 30, 2007.