Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History | Arolsen Archives

Karianne Hansen

Karianne Hansen is a third-year doctoral student at the Stanley Burton Centre for the study of the Holocaust and Genocide at the University of Leicester. Her doctoral thesis examines the construction of national identity among prisoners categorised as Norwegian political and racial enemies in the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

She holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Edinburgh (MSc Contemporary History) with a particular focus on political violence and genocide, and Birkbeck College, University of London (MRes History) where she carried out an in-depth study of the Auschwitz main camp prison in Block 11 under the supervision of Professor Nikolaus Wachsmann. Her interests include transnational approaches to the Nazi concentration camps, spaces considered the periphery of the Holocaust, and the question of national identities in contemporary European history.

During her six-week EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship she will spend two weeks at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich where she will consult the IG Farben trial material and affiliated archival holdings on post-war trials and on-site databases. Followed by a four week stay at Arolsen Archives, where she will access administrative records created by Nazi institutions as well sources created in the aftermath of the liberation of the camps in order to map the movements and fate of the Norwegians in the camp system.