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Sandra is a Visiting Research Fellow in 2025-26 and was a Research Fellow on the 'Good Citizens, Terrible Times' project at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
My research focuses on the history of mentalities of 20th-century Germany. I work with the evidence of lived experience to study meaning-making practices in the past that hold relevance for the cultural history of the Holocaust. My research at UCL contributes to the ‘Good Citizens, Terrible Times’ project with a microhistorical investigation of a set of petitions (ego-documents) written by ‘ordinary’ Germans in south-west Germany during the early Nazi and early postwar eras. The rich personal narratives found in the letters shed light on continuity and change in these two times of transition between democracy and dictatorship.
In December 2024, I completed my AHRC-funded PhD in History and German Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. I used the extensive private collection I found in my late grandmother’s attic in Freiburg im Breisgau to write a cultural family history of the Third Reich. By focusing on one far-reaching bourgeois kinship network, I studied how exclusionary ways of thinking were transposed from the realm of ideas into everyday deeds and actions.
In 2023, I co-curated the exhibition ‘Holocaust Letters’ at the Wiener Holocaust Library, London, and am co-editor of, and contributor to, the conference volume Holocaust Letters: Methodologies, Cases and Reflections, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2026. My research on bourgeois notions of Heimat, völkisch worldviews, and cultural family history has been published in journals including German Life and Letters, Jewish Cultural History, and the Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins.
I taught History at secondary schools in North London for ten years, worked in community education, and hold a Master's in Historical Research and a PGCE in Secondary History from the University of Oxford.
