Biographical Summary

Dr. Sara Halpern is a historian of Modern European and Jewish history with expertise in migration, statelessness, humanitarianism, and minority–majority relations. She earned her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2020 with a dissertation that received the 2022 Best Dissertation Award from the Ohio Academy of History.

Her dissertation forms the basis of her current book manuscript, Saving the Unwanted: Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees and the Global Struggle for Humanitarianism, 1943–1949, now under peer review. This book draws on transnational and comparative archival methods, as well as political and sociological theory, to reconstruct the history of aid to Shanghai’s 15,000 Central European Jewish refugees. It argues that the ideals of postwar humanitarianism — even outside of Europe — were never fully realized due to competing cultural understandings of aid and persistent Western imperialism in geopolitical affairs.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Leo Baeck Programme, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes on topics including the postwar trajectories of Central European Jewish refugees in Shanghai and San Francisco. Previously, she has held teaching appointments at St. Olaf College and Cardiff University. At the German Historical Institute, she is developing her second major project, Stateless by Design: Jewish Denationalization and Imperial Politics in Europe and Beyond.