Ms. Lauren Fedewa

Professional Background

Lauren Fedewa is a PhD candidate at the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto (UofT), specializing in Holocaust and genocide studies, modern Jewish history, and 20th-century European history. Ms. Fedewa earned her master’s in history from the University of Vermont and her bachelor’s degree in history and Germanic studies from the University of Maryland.

In addition to her doctoral studies, Ms. Fedewa is a graduate teaching assistant at UofT and facilitates the Zoryan Institute’s educational program on genocide and human rights for high school students across the Greater Toronto Region. She was also a co-organizer of the 27th Workshop on National Socialist Camps and Killing Sites: Proximities & Gaze in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and of the CJS Graduate Student Conference: Gazes and (Self) Constructions at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at UofT. 

Ms. Fedewa has been the recipient of several fellowships, including the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies (2022-2024), a visiting doctoral fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (2022), a Summer Graduate Research Assistantship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (2017), and the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship (2017). She has previously received a U.S. Fulbright Student Research Grant (2018-2019) in affiliation with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University Hannover (2018-2019) and worked as a research contractor (2021-2022) for the Mandel Center, where she researched and wrote entries on sites of persecution for non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 project. 

Fellowship Research

Lauren Fedewa was awarded the Sosland Foundation Fellowship for her research project, “‘Always one step away from death, always afraid’: Jewish Women and Girls who ‘Passed’ as Polish-Christian Forced Laborers in Germany during the Holocaust.” Her project foregrounds the narratives of Jewish women who attempted to “pass” as Polish-Christian civilian forced laborers in Germany during the Holocaust. This integrated history illuminates the experience and implications of passing to the study of the Holocaust, foregrounding it as not only an individual act but a performance involving actors, supporting actors, and audience, and one contingent on the wartime circumstances, stakes, and setting. She highlights Jewish passers as conscious agents who utilized their own dual identity as Polish Jews to play the role of a non-Jew through rehearsal, imitation, and adaptation, presenting hiding as a dynamic reperformance initiated and maintained by Jews themselves. Taking the approach of a “history of everyday life,” it examines social dynamics between Jewish passers, German officials and employers, and Polish and Ukrainian civilian laborers – in employment offices, transit camps, police stations, and prisons, as well as in social settings, labor sites, and lodgings.

This fellowship allows Ms. Fedewa access to the Museum’s archival collections, which include many first-hand survivor accounts, such as interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs. She will predominantly focus on survivors' oral histories and personal papers. Drawing on identifying data in first-hand accounts (false names and places of employment), she will also conduct targeted research on the plight of Jewish passers through access to the Arolsen Archives and utilizing the resources at the Museum’s Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. 

Residency Period: January 1, 2025–August 31, 2025