Elissa Mailänder

FR/EN

I am Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences Po and also serve as Deputy Director of the Centre interdisciplinaire d'études et de recherches sur l'Allemagne (CIERA). My research and teaching interests lie in the history of violence, gender and sexuality; material culture; and the history of the everyday. In particular, I explore material, social and cultural dimensions of violent acts.

My first book, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 (Lansing: Michigan State Press, 2015, German edition 2009), analyses the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of violence in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. I have also published several peer-reviewed articles on this topic. My most recent project examines friendship, intimacy and heterosexual relationships in Nazi Germany and the monograph Love, Marriage, Sex: An Intimate History of Nazi Germany, 1930-1950 will be published in 2021.

Although my work focuses primarily on 20th century Germany and Austria, I have found myself further intrigued by research questions best explored transnationally. This is an especially effective method when studying the different facets of violence. My new project, tentatively titled “Performative Transgressions in Armed Conflict: Military Trophy Selfies, from the Philippine-American War to the War in Iraq (1899-2011),” deals with snapshots of soldiers in the twentieth-century and explores the historical significance of these seemingly superficial tokens of war.

Originally trained as a scholar of comparative literature at the University of Vienna and the University Paris-Sorbonne (1993-1999; BA and MA), I earned my doctoral degree in Contemporary History and Historical Anthropology from the EHESS Paris and the University of Erfurt in 2007. In 2018, I completed my habilitation.

Last Publications

• Mailänder, Elissa. 2021. Amour, mariage, sexualité. Une histoire intime du nazisme (1930-1950). L'Univers historique. Editions Seuil.
• Mailänder, Elissa, Christian Buggeln, Christian Gudehus and Veronika Springmann. 2021. "Weit mehr als die Gewalt selbst. Von der Notwendigkeit komplexer Definitionen." WERKSTATTGESCHICHTE 83 (2021):85-101.
• Mailänder, Elissa. 2021. "Masters of Sex? Nazism, Bigamy, and a University Professor's Fight with Society and the State (1930–1970)." Journal of the History of Ideas 82 (1): 109-131.
• Mailänder, Elissa. 2020. "Aventurières, déclassées, brutes ? Retour sur les surveillantes SS des camps de concentration nazis." In Combattantes. Une histoire féminine de la violence, ed. Martial Poirson and Christiane Taubira, 170-179. Paris: Editions Seuil.
• Mailänder, Elissa and Jennifer V Evans. 2020. "Cross-dressing, Male Intimacy and the Violence of Transgression in Third Reich Photography." German History.