Dr. Robert M. Ehrenreich

Dr. Ehrenreich, who joined the Museum in 1999, heads Academic Research and Dissemination, which promotes the vitality and vibrancy of the study and teaching of the Holocaust through the cultivation, production, and dissemination of significant, rigorous, authoritative scholarly research and resources. Work includes the flagship journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, and scholarly monographs and translations.

Dr. Ehrenreich’s current research focuses on the material culture of the Holocaust, the study of the things that people created, hid, obtained, and repaired to provide insights into their lives and this history. He has also worked on representation and the Holocaust as well as the perpetrator-victim-bystander constellation. He is coediting a forthcoming book, The Material Culture of Difficult Histories, and contributing a chapter, “Talisman, Trophy, or Testament: Holocaust-Era Mica from the Theresienstadt Glimmerwerke.”

Prior to joining the Museum, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution; a research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana; a senior staff scientist at The National Academies; and an associate research professor at George Washington University.  

Dr. Ehrenreich serves on the Board of Directors of the Ultimate History Project, an e-journal, and as an advisor to the WAVE Trauma Centre in Northern Ireland. He was previously an External Examiner for Queen’s University, Belfast.

Education

• DPhil, archaeology, Keble College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, 1985

• AB, anthropology and archaeology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982

Languages

• English

Select Publications

• “Value in Context: Material Culture and Treblinka,” coauthored with Caroline Sturdy Colls, Current Anthropology (2021)

• “War in Context: Let the Artifacts Speak,” coauthor (2012)

• After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Cultur, coeditor (2009)

• “The Perpetrator-Bystander-Victim Constellation: Rethinking Genocidal Relationships,” coauthor, (2005)

Select Presentations and Interviews

• "The Material Turn in Holocaust Studies: Implications for Documenting Atrocity."  Organizer, chair, and discussant for the panel at the 137th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, CA. January 4-7, 2024.

• “A Mica Flake from Theresienstadt”. Episode for the EHRI Podcast Series, For the Living and the Dead: Traces of the Holocaust, October 22, 2022.

• “Upcycling Scarce Resources in the Nazi Camp Universe”. Presented with Margaret Mariani at the conference on Crafting Identities: Handicraft Programmes in Times of War, Genocide and their Aftermaths, c. 1890–1950, Holocaust Centre North, University of Huddersfield, UK. September 13-14, 2022

• “Bringing Together the Digital with Research, Teaching, and Conservation,” July 2020 co-presentation at virtual Twin Talks Workshop 3: Understanding and Facilitating Collaboration in Digital Humanities, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ DH2020 conference