Omer Bartov, Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the History Department at Brown University, is a leading scholar in modern European history. Born in Israel, he received his BA from Tel Aviv University in 1979 and his PhD from the University of Oxford in 1983. Bartov’s seminal early works examine the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and its role in World War II atrocities, including The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (1985) and Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991). He later investigated the interplay between total war and genocide in Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (1996), Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (2000), and Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (2003).

His scholarship on cultural representations includes The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (2005). In recent decades, Bartov has focused on interethnic coexistence, violence, and memory in Eastern European borderlands, authoring Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018)—which earned the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research—, Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He has edited significant volumes such as Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (2013), Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town (2020), and Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (2021). Additionally, Bartov published the novel The Butterfly and the Axe in 2023. As a Faculty Fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, he directed a multi-year collaborative project leading to Shatterzone of Empires and heads a student exchange program between Brown University and Hebrew University. His prolific scholarship, translated into numerous languages, establishes him as one of the foremost authorities on the Holocaust and genocide.

Professional Email: omer_bartov@brown.edu