Claudia Siebrecht

I am a cultural historian of war and my research focuses on Germany's colonial past and the First World War. I explore the emotional landscapes that shaped women's wartime experiences and agency, the construction of familial war memory and I have a particular interest in the nature of the archival record of war and colonialism.

In my first book, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women's Art of the First World War (Oxford University Press 2013), I examined how women expressed grief in a wartime context that expected proud bereavement and I co-edited the volumes Parenting and the State: Raising the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan: 2017) and Total War: an Emotional History (Oxford University Press, Proceedings of the British Academy: 2020) and recently published a chapter on war memory in the Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic. I currently work on my second monograph Concentration Camps Imprisonment in South West Africa 1904-1908: Agency and Testimony Beyond the Archival Grain.

I was educated at the University of Hamburg and Trinity College Dublin, where I completed my doctoral studies as a Government of Ireland Scholar and was awarded my PhD in 2007. Before joining the faculty at Sussex, I was a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Galway and held a post-doctoral research fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.