Europe without Angst? American Jews, Post-Holocaust France, and the Historian as Descendant

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Or, if my preferred photo can be used instead, This is a picture of a woman with brown hair sitting outside in front of greenery and flowers.
Photograph courtesy of Emma Kuby.

Emma Kuby

UW–Madison Open-topic Resident Fellow (2026–2027)

Professor, Department of History, UW–Madison

This talk explores the points of intersection between my own family’s story and my current scholarly book project, The Outsider Turned Ambassador: American Jewish Activism in Postwar France and its Empire, 1945-1955. The project reconstructs the vibrant community of Jewish American expatriates who lived and worked in France in the wake of the Holocaust, demonstrating how these men and women used France’s recovery from Nazi occupation and its late colonial struggles in North Africa to reengage with European culture and reimagine their own European roots. Since embarking on the book research, I have realized that my own maternal grandfather was briefly a member of this expatriate community. The talk considers how his passage through France and his tiny, precious archive of that experience fit into the complex transnational intellectual history that I am attempting to write. Is this project “about” my own family’s history in any meaningful sense? And what should I do differently, as a scholar and a writer, if it is?

Emma Kuby (Professor of History, UW–Madison) is an intellectual, political, and cultural historian of modern France and its empire. Her research focuses on the legacies of World War II’s violence during the era of decolonization. Her first book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell, 2019), examined a French-led activist campaign by Nazi camp survivors to expose ongoing crimes against humanity in the postwar USSR, Francoist Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Political Survivors received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Council for European Studies Book Award. Her scholarship has also appeared in multiple journals, including Modern Intellectual History, French Historical Studies, and Gender & History.

*Events currently open only to 2026-27 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*