An Environmental History of the November 1938 Terror萝莉社

The November 1938 pogroms launched against Jews in Third Reich (also known as Kristallnacht) included mass arrests of Jewish men, swelling the populations in concentration camps. In the Buchenwald camp, the rapid influx of nearly 10,000 persons, intentional overcrowding in segregated barracks, and the long-standing lack of adequate water and sewage infrastructure led to an outbreak of typhoid fever—a water-borne disease that flourishes in these conditions. Thousands were sickened, and hundreds of prisoners in Buchenwald died in just a few months.

In this webinar, Dr. Emily Gioielli will examine this epidemic and its context within the topography and water infrastructures at Buchenwald using a socio-environmental approach. She will also explore how we can gain new insights — for both environmental history/humanities and Holocaust history/studies — by considering the links between the environment and mass violence during the Holocaust.

This event is free and open to the everyone but registration is required.

REGISTER HERE [link coming soon!]

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Speaker Biography : Dr. Emily Gioielli is an historian of modern Europe and an assistant professor of teaching at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Massachusetts). Her research focuses on social and environmental histories of conflict and peace and the history of women, gender, and sexuality in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Hungary. She developed her current research with the support of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History (Munich), and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Her book Striking Activism: Women’s Labour Struggles in Eastern Europe and Beyond in the Long 20th Century. A Public History Volume in 13 Languages is forthcoming with Central European University Press/Amsterdam University Press.

This event is part of the 2026-2027 series on "Genocide and the Environment" being offered by the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. Speakers in this series represent a wide range of scholarly research and views; our guests' perspectives should not be taken as representative of the Cohen Institute or Keene State College as a whole. The webinar is made possible through donor funding. If you would like to make a gift to support this webinar or other Institute offerings, please visit ourwebsite.

This event is part of the Cohen Institute calendar.