Ms. Susanne Wiedemann

Professional Background

Ms. Susanne Wiedemann received an M.A. in North American studies from the Free University of Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute and an M.A. in museum studies from Brown University. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was a Ph.D. candidate in American civilization at Brown University. For her Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Ms. Wiedemann researched “The Shanghai Municipal Archives Files: Youth Culture and Public Health Issues in Shanghai in the 1940’s.”

Ms. Wiedemann has been awarded several esteemed prizes including the Brown University President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies Pre-Dissertation Travel Award. She is the recipient of the Leo Baeck Institute’s Fritz Halbers Fellowship, a Brown University Dissertation Fellowship, a German Academic Exchange Service Scholarship and, most recently, a Loewenstein-Wiener Fellowship at the American Jewish Archives. In 2003, Ms. Wiedemann participated in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies’ Interdisciplinary Workshop for Holocaust Scholars. She has presented her work at academic conferences across the United States, China, and Europe. Ms. Wiedemann has also taught a course in “The Holocaust in American Literature” at Brown University and Wheaton College.

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Center, Ms. Wiedemann investigated the files of the Shanghai Municipal Archives. She focused on the organizational structure of Shanghai Jewish youth culture and explored Jewish refugee public health issues in the late 1930’s and 1940’s. Her fellowship research was part of a larger dissertation project entitled, “Berlin-Shanghai-San Francisco: Ethnic Identity, Cultural Memory and Nationality in the (Re)Making of the Shanghailander’s Community” which examined the lives of Jews who moved to Shanghai during the Holocaust and then to the United States following the war. She studied how perceptions of America and American culture changed in these different refugee settings.

Ms. Wiedemann was in residence at the Mandel Center from October 1 to December 31, 2005.