Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is currently a Lecturer in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia.  He is also a consultant and writer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA.  He received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill in 2011 where he worked under the direction of Christopher Browning.  His first book examines the complicity of the German Army in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, focusing on ground level participation. That book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (HUP, 2014) won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book from Harvard Press.  The book also received the Honorable Mention for the Sybil Milton Memorial Book Prize for books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust from the German Studies Association.  This award is awarded every two years. Marching into Darkness was also a finalist for the Best Academic Publication on Belarus-related Problems for Foreign Authors at the 5th International Congress of Belarusian Studies.  The book has also been published in Polish as Polowanie na Żydów. Zbrodnie Wermachtu. Dr. Beorn is currently preparing a major project on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine.  This book project is tentatively entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv.  He has been awarded an NEH Summer Stipend to support the writing of this book. Dr. Beorn has also written a synthetic work, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).

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                As a member of an interdisciplinary group, Holocaust Geographies, which explores the spatial dynamics of the Holocaust, Dr. Beorn was a co-recipient of a National Science Foundation grant. This group has written an edited volume, Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2018.)  This is the first book to address the analysis of Holocaust spaces with GIS. He is also active in the digital humanities, currently working on multiple projects in GIS and 3D Modeling of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.  In addition, he has received a Faculty Global Research with Undergraduates grant to support research with two UVA students on the Holocaust in Lviv.  With his research team, Dr. Beorn is working on several major digital humanities projects in collaboration with the UVA Scholar’s Lab.  They include is the mapping of 17,000 residences for Jews in the Lviv ghetto, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe as a whole, and the mapping of Himmler’s appointment book.  Dr. Beorn is a co-PI on the successful UVA Learning Technology Incubator grant “Developing Effective Geo-Spatial Digital Pedagogy.” He is also a consultant and collaborator in the Faces of Auschwitz Digital Humanities project.

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            In addition to his first book, Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to chapters in several edited volumes.  He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships.

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            Dr. Beorn was previously the inaugural Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and assistant professor of History at the University of Nebraska- Omaha.  He teaches courses in Holocaust History, Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism, Modern European History, Jewish History, Historical Methodology, and Public History.

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            Outside of academia, he serves as a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum particularly in their programs aimed at military personnel.  He has co-written a training module in ethical military decision-making, Ordinary Soldiers, for ROTC cadets based on his research.  He also researches and writes web content for the USHMM online encyclopedia. Dr. Beorn has worked since 2007 with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.  He consulted on their 2009 exhibit “The Shooting of Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust by Bullets.”  In addition, he continues to serve the museum in its American Service Academy Program, leading discussions on the German Army and the Holocaust.  He also served as the Executive Director of the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Education Fund in Omaha, NE.

 

            Dr. Beorn is a 2000 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.