Lauren Crawford

Lauren Crawford is a historian of modern Europe, Holocaust memory, and the liberal international order. Her research concerns the moral and social meaning ascribed to political violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Her first book project examines the relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia in postwar Germany. It traces how a range of actors defined and understood different forms of antisemitism—secondary antisemitism, anti-Americanism as antisemitism, feminist anti-Judaism, and “new” or “imported” antisemitism—, and documents how these discourses on antisemitism overlapped with, and at times contributed to, rising Islamophobic sentiment in West and reunified Germany. Specifically, the project shows that these discourses were tightly connected to debates among leftists and feminists on increasing western intervention in Muslim-majority countries, from the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War, the first Gulf War, the Bosnian genocide, through the formal commencement of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. It argues that the key concepts of Holocaust memory culture— the uniqueness ascribed to the Holocaust and the political lessons derived from it— emerged during, and were defined by, these debates. In reconstructing them, the project reconceptualizes how Holocaust memory became the basis for the reunified German state’s liberal humanist ethical commitments, encapsulated in the language of “never again” and denoting the right to be free from violence.

Her research has been generously supported by the Fox Fellowship, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and the German American Fulbright Commission, among others. She was awarded the 2025 Konrad Jarausch Graduate Essay Prize in Central European History for the first chapter of her dissertation and the 2026 Hans Gatzke Prize for best dissertation in European History.

Lauren received her PhD with distinction from Yale University and holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College as well as a MSt in History from the University of Oxford.