Julia Riegel

Julia Riegel received their Ph.D. in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. They are currently a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, the Holocaust, and music during war and genocide. As a Starr Fellow, they are working on their first monograph, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto. This project uses sources written and preserved by ghetto residents to reconstruct how music performance represented, reproduced, and contributed to the ghetto’s complex and contentious social and cultural dynamics. They are also writing an article on portrayals of Ludwig van Beethoven in Yiddish literature and developing a second book project on gender, sexuality, and perceived collaboration in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. Their publications include an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry and articles for volumes III and VI of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.