Frances Tanzer is a historian of modern Central and East Central Europe, Jewish culture, and the Holocaust. She is interested in writing histories of modern Europe that focus on the paradoxical but crucial roles of refugees and minorities in shaping the continent’s identities and cultures. Her research examines culture in the borderlands of East Central Europe, the aftermath of the Holocaust; refugees and migration; and the history of antisemitism, philosemitism, and Islamophobia. A sustained interest in the visual culture and performance unites her explorations of these themes. At Clark, she offers classes in European history, the Holocaust, and refugee history.

Tanzer’s first book, Vanishing Vienna: Philosemitism, Modernism, and Jews in a Postwar City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) examines the fraught process of cultural reconstruction in Vienna from 1938 through the early 1960s. Vanishing Vienna’s starting point is the observation of the profound Jewish absence produced by the Holocaust: how does a city reimagine its culture in the relative absence of a once constitutive minority? In Vienna, conceptual and practical challenges grew from the reality of Jewish absence. In response to these challenges, this book argues that philosemitism became a surprising but foundational component of cultural reconstruction efforts and postwar Austrian identity, as well as early conceptions European integration and postwar discourses of cosmopolitanism.

Her second book project, Klezmer Dynasty: An Intimate History, 1880-2019, focuses on her own family, the Brandwein klezmer musicians of Habsburg Galicia. They innovated klezmer music and Jewish culture from 1880 to 2019 as they experienced the changes wrought by modernity, migration, the Holocaust, and its aftermath. This project connects the large-scale transformations that defined modern Jewish history to personal stories of reinvention.