Dr. Laura Brade

Dr. Laura Brade joined the Mandel Center in 2025 as the Rosalyn Unger Director of Campus Outreach Programs. Together with her team, she promotes the vitality of the field of Holocaust Studies through deep engagement with North American scholars, students, and university communities. As director, she manages programs that bring Holocaust studies directly to college and university campuses through on-campus lectures, interdisciplinary panel discussions, and pedagogy roundtables, as well as two seminars designed to bring faculty and advanced graduate students together for interdisciplinary conversations about teaching a specific aspect of the Holocaust. Dr. Brade’s research explores refugees, humanitarians, and networks of escape from East Central Europe, with a particular focus on today’s Czech Republic. She is also interested in the uses of data-driven and digital history methods in research and pedagogy.

Dr. Brade was an Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Holocaust Studies Service Learning Program at Albion College in Albion, Michigan from 2017-2024. She also taught Upper School history at the Park School of Baltimore in 2024. She held the Margit Meissner Fund for the Study of the Holocaust in the Czech Lands Fellowship at the Mandel Center in 2013-2014, a Fulbright Fellowship in the Czech Republic in 2012-2013, and a Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies from the Claims Conference from 2012-2014.

Education

• PhD, history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017

• MA, history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011

• BA, history and German, Pacific Lutheran University, 2008

Languages

• English

• German

• Czech

Publications

• “Humanitarian Mobilization in the Bohemian Lands, 1938-1939” in Humanitarianism in East-Central Europe: Local, National, and International Perspectives, edited by Michal Frankl and Anca Cretu (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025): 189-208.

• “‘What the Authorities of the Land Wish Done’: Relief and Rescue by the American Committee for Service in Czechoslovakia, 1938–1939”, Soudobé dějiny/Czech Journal of Contemporary History 3 (2023): 761-784.

• “More than Helpers: Women’s Roles in ‘Communities of Rescue’ in the Bohemian Lands, 1938-1939,” in Beyond “Ordinary Men”: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography (Leiden: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019): 96-108.

• (with Rose Holmes) “Troublesome Sainthood: Nicholas Winton and the Contested History of Child Rescue in Prague, 1938-1940,” History and Memory 29/1 (2017): 3-40.

Select Presentations and Interviews

• Panelist, “Engaging Data in the History Classroom,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, (San Francisco, CA. Jan. 4-7, 2024)

• Panelist, “Teaching Writing Writing Workshop: Teaching Writing in the Age of AI,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, (San Francisco, CA. Jan. 4-7, 2024)