Ms. Elissa Mailänder-Koslov

Professional Background

Ms. Elissa Mailänder Koslov earned an M.A and a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of Vienna and an M.A. in German studies from the Sorbonne, where her thesis won the Pierre Grappin Foundation Prize. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Erfurt in Germany, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. For her Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Ms. Mailänder Koslov conducted research on her project, “Workaday Violence: Female Guards at Lublin-Majdanek (1942-1944).”

The author of several scholarly articles, Ms. Mailänder Koslov is the co-editor of Lagersystem and Repräsentation: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager (Tübingen, 2004). She is the recipient of research scholarships from the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. She has lectured extensively on her work at conferences in the United States and Europe.

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Center, Ms. Mailänder Koslov conducted research on the female SS guards of the Lublin-Majdanek camp, examining the structures, mechanisms and dynamics of violence there. Her study reconstructed the trajectories of female guards and analyzed the social composition of the guard corps, filling a gap in the historical record on Nazi female perpetrators.

Ms. Mailänder Koslov was in residence at the Mandel Center from March 1 to May 31, 2006.