24th Holocaust Memorial Lecture

The University of Glasgow are delighted to welcome Dr Waitman Wade Beorn, Assitant Professor for History at Northumbria University, to present the 24th Holocaust Memorial Lecture, entitled Placing the Holocaust: Observations from the Janowska Camp, Ukraine.

Lecture Overview

The Holocaust was a profoundly spatial event; it took place in specific locations and under specific circumstances, rather than in a theoretical realm. Yet, we often take the places of the Holocaust for granted or as mere backdrops to the event itself. By examining details of the Janowska camp, located outside of Lviv in what is now Ukraine, this lecture will show how looking at the space of destruction -- both metaphorically and literally -- can further our understandings of some of the universal elements of the Holocaust.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an Assistant Professor in History at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. He received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill where he worked under the direction of Christopher Browning. His first book examined the complicity of the German Army in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, focusing on ground level participation. That book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard University Press, 2014) won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book from Harvard Press. The book also received the Honorable Mention for the Sybil Milton Memorial Book Prize for books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust from the German Studies Association. Dr. Beorn is also the author of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and has recently finished a book on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to chapters in several edited volumes. He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships.

As a member of an interdisciplinary group, Holocaust Geographies, which explores the spatial dynamics of the Holocaust, Dr. Beorn was a co-recipient of a National Science Foundation grant. This group has written an edited volume, Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2018.) This is the first book to address the analysis of Holocaust spaces with GIS. He is also active in the digital humanities. From 2023-2025, he will be working on an AHRC-funded project to create including a digital reconstruction of the Janowska camp and associated learning materials.

As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Beorn has published pieces in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Forward. He has also appeared on CNN, Richard French Live on WRNN, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and TRT. He is an active contributor to public history and engagement on Twitter as well.

Dr. Beorn teaches courses in Holocaust History, Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism, Modern European history, Jewish history, Historical Methodology, Public history, and Digital history.

Dr. Beorn is a 2000 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.