Alexandra Birch

Dr. Alexandra Birch is a professional violinist and historian who works comparatively on the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet mass atrocity, including the Gulag, through the lens of music and sound. She holds a PhD in History from the University of California Santa Barbara, and a DMA from Arizona State University in violin performance. Currently she is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Previously, she was a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wilson Center, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, where she released CDs of recovered music and finished her first book, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe (University of Toronto Press). Her current project “Sonic Shatterzones, The Intertwined Spaces, Sound and Music of Nazi and Soviet Atrocity,” investigates eight case studies of the Holocaust in the USSR and Gulag, including indigenous interactions with Solovki, new recordings of Mieczysław Weinberg’s compositions from his time in Tashkent, sound recordings of the Gulag in Kazakhstan and of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and post-Soviet world premiere compositions, creating a humanizing look at incomprehensible violence.