Research Associate Professor of International and Global Studies.
Shana Minkin is Research Associate Professor of International and Global Studies. She was previously Associate Professor and chair of IGS before relocating permanently to Berlin in 2023. She is available to mentor IGS students studying and researching in Germany or throughout Europe.
In addition to serving as Research Associate Professor, Minkin is a Lecturer with New York University-Berlin, teaching classes focused on modern Germany history from the margins, with a special focus on the German Jewish and Muslim populations. She also works extensively with the Berlin Mitte Stolpersteine Initiative as a researcher and educator focused on the history of the Holocaust and dehumanization.
Minkin’s research spans imperial Egypt to present-day Germany. Her first book, Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt (Stanford University Press 2019), reveals how the processing of dead bodies allowed British and French imperial powers to make claims of belonging in Egypt, placing her work at the intersection of Middle East history, European imperial histories, and death studies. She has also published articles and chapters in edited volumes on questions of death, archives, colonialism, and more. Her current project is a work that is part oral history, part memoir. Minkin is intertwining the story of an Egyptian Jewish woman, Vera al-Karib, who chose to stay in Egypt after the dispersion of the Egyptian Jewish community in the 1950s, with her own experiences in Berlin today as a scholar of German memory culture and belonging.
