Meet the Faculty

Sara Sewell

Sara Sewell

Professor of History

Degrees Held

B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A., Marquette University
M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Office Location: Birdsong 205
Phone: 757-455-3237
Email: ssewell@vwu.edu
Department/s:
- History
-

Sara Ann Sewell is a professor of modern European cultural and gender history. She received her bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin with majors in French and International Relations. She earned master's degrees in Journalism from Marquette University and History from the University of Wisconsin. She also received a doctorate in History from the University of Wisconsin.

At Virginia Wesleyan, her courses include Love, Marriage, Family; Bach to the Sex Pistols; World War One; World War Two; History of Nazism; the Holocaust, Comparative Genocide; European Women’s History; and the History of Pop and Rock Music.

Her current research investigates Holocaust victims’ experiences, focusing on their audial, sensorial, and emotional lives. She is writing a book entitled Sounding, Hearing, Silencing: Experiencing Holocaust Soundscapes. She also researches communism in Germany during the interwar years with a focus on the everyday lives of ordinary communists.

Books

Co-author, Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground, ed. Andrew Stuart Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding, Berghahn Books, 2017.

Journal Articles

  • “Acoustic Assaults on the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concourse,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, October 2024, 1-20. 
  • “Screams: Expressions of Fear Thundering in Holocaust Soundscapes,” for a special issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, “Emotions and Holocaust Studies,” ed. Stefanie Fischer and Kobi Kabalek, (forthcoming).
  • “‘Rächen. Nicht trauern.’ Deutsche kommunistisch-antifaschistische Trauerkultur, 1931-1932” (“’Avenge. Don’t mourn.’ German Communist-Antifascist Mourning Culture, 1931-1932”), Arbeit-Bewegung-Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Studien, vol. 21, 2022, no 2, (May 2022), 73-94.
  • “Antifascism in the Neighborhood: Daily Life, Political Cultural, and Gender Politics in the German Communist Antifascist Movement, 1930-1933,” Fascism. Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, vol. 9, no. 1-2 (December  2020), 167-94.
  • “Forging a Revolutionary Community through Ritual: Communist May Days in Weimar Germany, 1919-1924,” Socialist History, vol. 54 (2019), 7-34.
  • “Bolshevizing Communist Women: The Red Women and Girls’ League in Weimar Germany, Central European History, vol. 45 (2012), 268-305.
  • “Mourning Comrades: Communist Funerary Rituals in Cologne during the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (October 2009), 537-48.

Book Chapters

  • “Echoes of Disembarkation at Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Sonic Memories of Survivors,” in Transitions of Memory. Narratives of Violence in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Matteo Cassani Siminetti and Roberta Mira, Viella Publishing House, 2024, 175-88.
  • “’The whole language was a scream.’: The German Language during the Seizures of Jews,” in A Companion to Sound Studies in German-Speaking Cultures, ed. Rolf Goebel, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023, 133-47.
  • “Sonic Experiences in the Night: The Case of the Falling Bunk at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust, ed. Frédéric Bonnesoeur, Hannah Wilson, and Christin Zühlke, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023, 161-77.
  • “Surveillance on the Assembly Line: Views of Modern Production from the Shop Floor at the Stollwerck Chocolate Factory in Cologne, 1924-1930,” in Eyes and Ears of Power: Actors and Phenomena in Histories of Surveillance, ed. Andreas Marklund and Laura Skouvig, London: Routledge, 2021, 87-104.
  • “Spectacles in Everyday Life: The Disciplinary Function of Communist Culture in Weimar Germany.” in Spectacle, German Visual Culture, vol. II, ed., Jennifer Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015, 129-56.
  • “The Party Does Indeed Fight Like a Man: The Construction of a Masculine Ideal in the German Communist Party during the Weimar Republic,” in Weimar Culture Revisited, ed. John Williams, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011, 161-82.

Web Publications