Research on women and religion during World War I
We warmly welcome Andrea A. Sinn from Elon University in Nort Carolina!
In June and July 2025 she will be working on her project “Joining the German Home Front: Women, Religion, and World War I”.
Funded by the Hamburg Scholarship of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation F.V.S. and the Dr. Gabriele Meyer-Fellowship
Andrea Sinn is Associate Professor of History at Elon University/NC, USA, where she heads the interdisciplinary Jewish Studies program as well as the International and Global Studies Program. Her research interests focus on modern German and Jewish history, with an emphasis on the Third Reich and the immediate post-war period of the Holocaust, as well as on women and religion on the German home front during World War I. Among her publications are German Jews and Migration to the United States, 1933–1945, edited with Andreas Heusler (Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022); Die Erfahrung des Exils: Vertreibung, Emigration und Neuanfang – Ein Münchner Lesebuch, edited with Andreas Heusler (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2015); Jüdische Politik und Presse in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); and “Und ich lebe wieder an der Isar”: Exil und Rückkehr des Münchner Juden Hans Lamm (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2008).
During my time at the IGdJ, I will review and analyze archival materials in the city of Hamburg needed to advance my most recent scholarly work, which explores the range of efforts and suffering of German women of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic faiths during the First World War. My research and book project is inspired by the apparent absence of female and minority perspectives in studies addressing the Great War in the German context. A particular focus of my research is on the Jewish Community Archive, the archives of Hamburg shipping companies, and the personal collection of Alfred Toepfer.