Prof. Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University.
Currently she is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide, UCL Institute for Advances Studies, and in January 2023 she starts her appointment as a Visiting Full Professor in Holocaust and Contemporary History at Lund University.
She is also a Co-Editor in Chief of Genealogy Journal.
Her research focuses on social and cultural history of Poland and East European Jews, the Holocaust and its memory in Europe, East European Jewish childhood, antisemitism and nationalism in Europe and European Jewish heritage and education for civil society and against racism and antisemitism. She is a recipient of many prestigious academic awards and fellowships, most recently Gerda Henkel Fellowship, 2017 - 2021.
Her major publications include
- Neighbors Respond: The Controversy about Jedwabne (2004; co-edited with Antony Polonsky)
- Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, (translated into Polish in 2015 and nominated for the Best History Book of Kazimierz Moczarski Award 2016 in Poland; Hebrew translation, with new epilogue, published by Yad Vashem Studies, 2021)
- Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, co-edited with John-Paul Himka (Lincoln, NUP, 2012)
- Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory (Brandeis University Press/NEUP, January 2017)