Natalia
Aleksiun

University of Florida
Dalck and Rose Feith Family Fellow

Research Topic

Jews, Cadavers, and the Politics of Medical Discourse in East Central Europe

Bio

Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses on the Holocaust and its aftermath, Eastern Europe, Jewish childhood, and the history of medicine. She serves as editor of East European Jewish Affairs and has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews and the Holocaust. She is completing a monograph on the so-called “Cadaver Affair” in medical schools in East Central Europe between two world wars.  

Aleksiun holds doctoral degrees from Warsaw University and New York University.

Selected publications

  • Gender and Jewish Women in Central and Eastern Europe: Sources and Interpretations, coedited with E. Bemporad (Palgrave, under contract). 
  • “Pleading for Cadavers: Medical Students at the University of Vienna and the Study of Anatomy,” Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation 2.2 (2015): 4–10.

Fellowship

2014–2015

Deepening our understanding of the intellectual revolution at the heart of modern Jewish history.

2017–2018

Posing new questions about the theories, institutions, and paradigms shaping the study of nature, and about the cultural and religious consequences that emerge from such study.

2024–2025

Exploring health through the intersection between bodies and systems, language and physicality, religion and science, and beyond.