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Anika Walke

Askwith Family Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies

Bio

Anika Walke joined the department in 2025 as the Inaugural Askwith Family Chair of Holocaust Studies. Prior to that, she served as Associate Professor of History and Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Walke’s research and teaching interests include the history and memory of war and genocide, flight and migration, nationality policies, and gender and sexuality in Eastern Europe. A graduate of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Walke draws on an interdisciplinary framework to study processes of remembering and commemoration, survival and resistance, and the role of space and place for historical experience and sense-making.

Her book Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015) drew on oral history interviews, video testimony, archival documentation and various other sources to analyze how young Soviet Jews survived the Holocaust and made sense of it many decades later. Together with Jan Musekamp and Nicole Svobodny she edited Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia (Indiana University Press, 2017). She regularly publishes peer reviewed articles and book chapters on the history and memory of the Holocaust, on the Soviet Jewish experience, and on various subjects related to the construction of memory. She is currently working on a new monograph on the long aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II in Belarus.

From 2014 to 2022, Walke served as Co-PI of “The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events,” an NEH-funded endeavor of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative to develop a Historical GIS of Nazi-era ghettos in Eastern Europe. In addition, she has held a range of fellowships including most recently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Senior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at Freiburg University in Germany (Spring 2024).

Education

Ph.D.: University of California, Santa Cruz, 2011

Books

Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; Paperback 2018.

Jüdische Partisaninnen. Der verschwiegene Widerstand in der Sowjetunion. Berlin: Dietz, 2007.

Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia. Eds. Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, Nicole Svobodny. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

Upcoming and recent articles and book chapters

“Bodies in the Ground: Holocaust Mass Graves in Eastern Europe as Jewish Presence,” POLIN Vol. 38, Special Issue: “Gender and Body in East European Jewish History” (2026 [in press]).

“Kinship, redefined: Family partisan units in German-occupied Belarus,” in Arkadii Zeltser, ed., The Jewish Family in the USSR during the Second World War (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2025 [in press]).

“From Belarus to Illinois: What the Holocaust in German-Occupied Soviet Territories Has Got to Do with Anti-Black Violence in the US—Thoughts on Violence, Space, and Memory,” in William Donahue and Jens Gurr, eds. Cultures of Memory, Amnesia, and Misprision (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter (2026, [in press]).

“The Black Book of Soviet Jewry between Testimony and Literature,” in Erin McGlothlin and Stuart Taberner, eds. Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

„Meurtre Public Dans Le Village: Témoigner de’l Holocauste en Biélorussie,“ in eds. Boris Czerny et Claire Le Foll, eds., La Shoah en Biélorussie: Cadre historique et innovations méthodologiques (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2025), 71-88.

„Im Wald: Jüdische Partisaninnen,“ in Frank-Lothar Kroll and Stefan Lehnstaedt, eds.. Jüdischer Widerstand in Europe: Grundlagen, Formen, Netzwerke (Berlin: bebra, 2024), 25-38.

“Belated and Incomplete: Recognizing the Righteous Among the Nations in Belarus,” In Natalia Aleksiun, Raphael Utz, Zofia Wóycicka. eds., The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 2024), 241-280.

“Testimony in Place: Witnessing the Holocaust in Belarus,” East European Jewish Affairs 52, no. 1 (2023): 80-104.

“Svidetel’stvo s mesta prestuplenia: novye podkhody k izucheniu Kholokosta v Belarusi,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 141 (2002): 183-228. (Translation of “Testimony in Place”)

“A People’s Biography: Ada El’evna Raichonak, Germanavichy,” Autobiografia: Literatura/Kultura/ Media 14, no. 1 (2020): 123-144.

“Historische Orte als Chiffre: Protestbewegung und Erinnerungskultur in Belarus,“ Osteuropa 70, no. 10-11 (2020): 385-398.

Anne Kelly Knowles, Justus Hillebrand, with Paul B. Jaskot and Anika Walke, “Integrative, Interdisciplinary Database Design for the Spatial Humanities: The Case of the Holocaust Ghettos Project,” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 14, no. 1-2 (2020): 64-80.

“’To Speak for Those Who Cannot’: Masha Rol’nikaite on Anti-Jewish and Sexual Violence during the German Occupation of Soviet Territories.” Jewish History 33, no. 1-2 (2020): 215-244.

“Split Memory: The Geography of Holocaust Memory and Amnesia in Belarus.” Slavic Review 77, no.1 (2018): 174-197.

Courses

The Holocaust: What You Should Know, and Why
War, Genocide, and Gender in Modern Europe
Gender and Sexuality in Eastern Europe

Department Member Since 2025