Sarah Gensburger is a social scientist, working in history, sociology and political science. She obtained her MA from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po Paris (2000), and her PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, 2006). Her dissertation, on the process of remembrance through the title of Righteous among the Nations, won the French Political Science Association prize for the best dissertation (Paris, 2007) as well as a special award from the Auschwitz Foundation (Brussels, 2007). She is currently a tenured researcher in social sciences at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), member of the ISP research center.
Her research is situated at the intersection of ethnographic methodology and contemporary historiographic issues. She is interested in the contemporary dynamic of memory and material culture and raises issue of the social role of memory in framing social behaviors. As an historian, she is the specialist of the Holocaust in Paris, focusing both on rescue and economic looting. Using this perspective, she has analyzed several case studies, published several books and numerous articles and papers in peer-reviewed journals, and edited books in French, English, German, Polish and Spanish. As an academic, she is the author of National Policy, Global Memory (Berghahn Books, 2016), Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews (Indiana University Press, 2015), the co-editor of Resisting Genocides. The Multiple Forms of Rescue (Columbia University Press, 2011) and the co-author of Nazi Labor Camps in Paris (Berghahn Books, 2011) and of Visites scolaires, histoire et citoyenneté. Les expositions du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale (La Documentation française, 2016). She recently worked on the social reactions to the terrorist attacks in Paris and published Mémoire vive. Chroniques d’un quartier. Bataclan 2015-2016, Anamosa, 2017.
During the past ten years, She have also developed a new form of writing, addressing a broader, and non-academic, audience. She wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times “The Banality of Robbing the Jews”. She directed, or wrote in, several exhibition catalogs such as C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetage des enfants juifs à Paris (ed., Skira Flammarion, 2012). And she curated several major historical exhibitions (at the Louvre Museum, the Hotel de Ville in Paris or for BETC Worldwide).