Dr Laura Tradii - Teaching Fellow in Modern German History
Laura Tradii is a historian of twentieth century Europe, with a focus on war history and German history (Second World War and Cold War, and their intersecting legacies).
Her research combines her background in social anthropology (PhD University of Cambridge, 2021) and the history of medicine (MSc History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Oxford, 2016) to investigate war and its legacies, with a particular focus on the management of military mass death. She is interested in how military death is managed practically and bureaucratically (exhumations, reburials, recordkeeping), its political dimension, and how its material afterlives are experienced by the populations inhabiting former battlefields.
Her monograph, Fallen of Total Defeat: German war dead in socialist East Germany (1945-90) explores the treatment of German fallen soldiers on GDR soil during the Cold War. It is the result of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (School of History, University of Kent) and it is currently under review.
Before her postdoctoral fellowship, Laura was a research associate at London School of Economics in the Wellcome Trust project Human Rights / Human Remains. She researched the history of forensic anthropological practices, and how these entered the management of the dead. Her PhD in Social Anthropology, sponsored by a Vice-Chancellor’s Award, investigated through 15 months of ethnographic field research the everyday coexistence with omnipresent traces of war in rural Brandenburg.
Laura has taught courses on modern European history, the cultural history of war, and the history of medicine and the body. At Royal Holloway, she teaches Modern German History, as well as a variety of modern European history modules.
Email: laura.tradii@rhul.ac.uk
