Frances Tanzer is a historian of modern Central and East Central Europe, Jewish culture, and the Holocaust. Her scholarly work straddles Central and Eastern Europe, while also examining the region’s global interconnections—particularly those connections established through migration and forced displacement. Her research examines the aftermath of the Holocaust; histories of displacement; and the history of antisemitism and philosemitism. A sustained interest in visual culture and performance unites her explorations of these themes. 

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.

Tanzer recieved her B.A. (2010) in studio art and history from the University of Toronto and her MA (2012) and Ph.D. (2018) from Brown University. Her work has been supported by the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Jewish History, the Remarque Institute at NYU and others. At Clark, Tanzer offers undergraduate and graduate classes in European history, the Holocaust, and refugee histories, as well as urban culture, modern memory, antisemitism and racism, and border technologies. She is presently the Director of Graduate Studies at the Strassler Center.