Bio

Jules Riegel (they/them) received their Ph.D. in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, the Holocaust, and music during war and genocide. Their scholarship has been supported by a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies; a Fulbright Institute of International Education Grant to Warsaw, Poland; and a Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Sosland Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others.

They are working on their first monograph, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto. This project uses sources written and preserved by ghetto residents to reconstruct how music performance represented, reproduced, and contributed to the ghetto’s complex and contentious social and cultural dynamics. They are also developing a second book project on gender, sexuality, and perceived collaboration in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust, and are planning future research on transgender history in Eastern Europe. They have a forthcoming article on beggars’ music in the Warsaw Ghetto accepted for publication in the journal Jewish Social Studies. Their other publications include an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry and articles for volumes III and VI of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.

Research Interests

• Eastern European Jewish history
• The Holocaust
• Gender and sexuality in Eastern Europe
• Music history