Grinspoon Foundation Fellow Professor Jennifer Evans
Professor Jennifer Evans completed her Ph.D. in modern European studies at State University of New York Binghamton and her M.A. in European history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was Assistant Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. For her Jeffrey Grinspoon and the Harold Grinspoon Foundation Fellowship on the Persecution of Homosexuals, Professor Evans conducted research for her project “‘In the Name of the People’: The Legal and Medical Management of Homosexuality in Hitler’s Germany.”
Professor Evans is the recipient of numerous fellowships and scholarships including the American Historical Association Scholarship for Research in Europe, Asia or Africa for her project “The Rape of German Women, 1945-1949,” the German Historical Institute Dissertation Fellowship for her project “Fraternization in Postwar Berlin,” and the Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Advanced Study in German and European History for her work on “Sexual Morality in Postwar Germany.” She researched the attitudes of postwar East and West Germans toward sexual deviance for her dissertation “Reconstruction Sites: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Limits of National Belonging in Postwar Berlin, 1944-1958.” She explored two themes: the continuation of state intervention into the private sexual realm as well as the influence of the Nazi socio-biological notion of the family ideal on national identity formation. Professor Evans has published articles in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Canadian Journal of History, International Labor and Working Class History, and the German Studies Review. At Carleton University she taught both undergraduate and graduate courses including The Holocaust in History, War and Society, Sex and Sexuality in Modern Europe, Hitler’s Racial State, and The Social History of Sexuality, among several others.
During her fellowship at the Museum, Professor Evans built upon her dissertation and explored Nazi policies and legislation from the early 1940’s. She compared police records from this time to those of subsequent years in order to illuminate the ways in which the control of sexual behavior changed hands from the Nazi-era on to the occupied and then divided German states in the 1970’s.