Dr. Erica Lehrer

Professional Background

Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist, historian, and curator. She is a professor in the History Department at Concordia University, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies, Montreal, and is the founding director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL). She is also the principal investigator on the international team project “Thinking Through the Museum: A Partnership Approach to Curating Difficult Knowledge in Public.”

Dr. Lehrer is the author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press 2013); and co-editor of Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (Kritika Polityczna, 2023); My Museum, A Museum About Me (Jagiellonian/Columbia University Press, 2023); Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (McGill-Queens 2016); Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015); and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave 2011), among others, as well as numerous articles. 

Fellowship Research

Erica Lehrer was awarded the Robert A. Savitt Fellowship for her research project, “Material Legacies of Aid to Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland.” She will be investigating the open-ended biographies and shifting meanings of material objects that passed from Jews to the non-Jewish Poles who helped them survive the Holocaust. Such objects of exchange were a common part of the wartime economy and mediated processes of hiding Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. “Gifted” by grateful Jews who received help, or “inherited” by Poles when their original owners were murdered, captured, or otherwise unable to return to claim their property, they serve as enduring, sometimes awkward traces of these experiences and transactions, and as entry points into exploring shifting notions of morality and vectors of memory in the aftermath of World War II.

This fellowship allows Dr. Lehrer access to USHMM’s archives and collections to locate such objects, identify how they came to be donated to the museum, and identify what remaining actors may still be available to interview. She will explore object inventories, accession information, and talk to current or prior curatorial and collections staff members to trace additional objects in or beyond the collection that may have yet to be considered in relation to her particular areas of interest.

Residency Period: September 1, 2024–December 31, 2024