Teresa Malice is research assistant at the chair of Contemporary history at Bielefeld University. Her current Habilitation project investigates female narrations of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Austria between the 1920s and 1940s, through diaries and letters. By looking at ego-documents produced by so-called “ordinary women”, in their majority uninvolved or only partially involved in the systems of power, the project aims to proove and possibly expand the analytic potential and complexity of the concept of bystander, challenging it through a comparative perspective and a gender-based perspective which takes into account as variable, together with the repression, intimidation and coercion operated by racialized and violent states, the patriarchal, likewise repressive nature of such states. The central part of the research will be centered around coeval writings describing the impact of violence, exclusion, antisemitism, deportation and the Holocaust in daily lives; while the final part of it will be centered around memoirs written in the immediate postwar period, looking at the repercussions of the Stunde Null on interpretations of past events and narrations of the self. At the Center for Holocaust Studies, Teresa is further developing her project and visiting the archive of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.

Teresa received her PhD in 2019 at the University of Bologna, in cotutelle with Bielefeld University, with a dissertation titled “Transnational Imaginations of Socialism. Political Town Twinning between Italy and the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and 1970s”. She graduated in 2013 at the University of Bologna with a thesis about the uprising of June 17, 1953 in East Berlin and its reception by the Italian left. In the past few years, she has been visiting fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark (2018), start-up fellow at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (2015) and Erasmus student at the Humboldt Universität Berlin (2012). She collaborates, in research, teaching and public history projects, with Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna in Bologna, and with Istituto storico della Resistenza e dell’età contemporanea di Parma.

Winson Chu is Associate Professor of Modern Central European History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. As a Humboldt Research Fellow from March 2020 to August 2021 at the Center for Holocaust Studies, Dr. Chu is working on how locals serving in the Kriminalpolizei (German Criminal Police, Kripo) in the Central Polish city of Łódź/Litzmannstadt facilitated the Holocaust.

This work engages three interrelated aspects: the Kriminalpolizei as an organization of persecution, the continuing networks between the Łódź Ghetto and the rest of the city, and Germanization in occupied Poland. This integrated perspective reframes occupied Łódź as one city and follows interethnic ties across the interwar, war, and postwar periods. Dr. Chu completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and was awarded the annual Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize given by the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His monograph, The German Minority in Interwar Poland, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012 and received a Fraenkel Prize commendation by the Wiener Library in London.

Dr. Chu is also the co-author of “A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe? The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars,” which appeared in the September 2013 volume of German History and which was awarded the Article Prize of the German History Society. In 2017, he published “From Łódź to Litzmannstadt: German Pasts and Holocaust Sites in Post-Communist Poland” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.