Elissa Mailänder is associate professor of contemporary history at the Centre for History (CHSP) at Sciences Po in Paris (France) and an associate research fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (Germany). She is co-leading the project Trophy Photographs: Performative Transgressions of Ordinary Soldiers in World War II.
Born in Italy, Mailänder studied comparative literature and holds a master’s degree in French literature from the University of Vienna (Austria) and one in German studies from the University Paris-Sorbonne (France). Mailänder later changed her focus to history and earned her joint PhD (co-tutelle de thèse) in contemporary history and historical anthropology from the École des Hautes Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and the University of Erfurt in 2007. From 2008 to 2009 she was a research fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen (Germany). Mailänder then worked as a lecturer for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at EHESS and the Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’Allemagne (CIERA), Paris. In 2012, she was appointed associate professor of contemporary history at Sciences Po in Paris. A historian of gender and sexuality and a specialist of Nazi Germany and World War II, she focuses on the history of violence that she analyzes from a material, social, political and cultural dimension.
Research Focus
Mailänder has published extensively on perpetrator history and the practices, structures and mechanisms of violence in Nazi Germany. With Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015; originally published in German in 2009), Mailänder focused on female perpetrators and the complex socio-structural dynamics that generated individual abuse, mass violence and genocide. Her latest book, Amour, mariage, sexualité: Une histoire intime du nazisme, 1930-1950 (Paris: Seuil, 2021), examines friendship, intimacy and heterosexual relationships in Nazi Germany, highlighting the importance of mass participation and practices of everyday conformity to dictatorship. Mailänder also is a founding member of the international and interdisciplinary research group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.
Awards and Recognition
Elissa Mailänder is the 2008 winner of the Herbert Steiner Prize for outstanding doctoral dissertation attributed by the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, Vienna.