Omer Bartov

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Omer Bartov has written widely on modern Germany, France, the Holocaust, and representations of war and genocide. He is the author of four books and the editor of three volumes. His work has been translated into several languages. His book Murder in Our Midst (Oxford University Press: 1996) received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. His most recent book, Mirrors of Destruction (Oxford University Press: 2000), is an analysis of the relationship between total war and state-organized genocide and the emergence of modern identity.

During his Radcliffe fellowship, Bartov will trace the origins of genocide in the Eastern Galician town of Buczacz. Composed of a mixed Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian population, Buczacz saw the eradication of its Jewish inhabitants in World War II. While the main outlines of the Holocaust in East Galicia have been reconstructed, we know little about how it unfolded from one community to the next or the social fabric within which it occurred. Bartov will investigate the dynamic that transformed a community based on interaction and cooperation into one of genocide.

Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and was a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Davis Center and a junior fellow at Harvard University's Society of Fellows. He earned his DPhil from Oxford University.