Melissa Kravetz
Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Minor

Melissa Kravetz is an Associate Professor of History and Co-Chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Longwood University. Her research and teaching interests include European history, especially German history, Holocaust history, the history of women, gender, and sexuality, the history of science and medicine, and the history of anti-fascism.

She also teaches courses on the history of the Holocaust for K-12 teachers at the Virginia Holocaust Museum's Alexander Lebenstein Teacher Education Institute (TEI) in the summers.

She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Maryland (2011) and a B.A. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2003).

In 2024, she published The Memoir of Ilse Seger: Wife, Mother, Hostage, Nazi Resister with Indiana University Press. Ilse was the wife of Gerhart Heinrich Seger, a German Social Democratic member of the Reichstag from 1930 to 1933, who was reelected for the last time on March 5, 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. A week later, the Nazis arrested him and held him in "protective custody" for three months in a local prison in Dessau and then sent him to Oranienburg concentration camp for six months, until he escaped to Czechoslovakia. In her memoir, Ilse tells Gerhart's story, but more importantly, she tells her own story: of her early resistance to the Nazi regime as a political opponent herself; of her solidarity with the Jews during the early years of Nazi persecution; of her defiance of expectations for women at the time; of her time as a hostage alongside her daughter, Renate, in Rosslau concentration camp and how they got out with help from members of Parliament; and, lastly, of her first years living in exile in France and Switzerland as her husband went on an anti-fascist speaking tour in the US. 

Her first book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics, and Professional Identity came out with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. It was republished in paperback in 2023. She appeared on the New Books Network podcast to discuss her book: https://newbooksnetwork.com/melissa-kravetz-women-doctors-in-weimar-and-nazi-germany-maternalism-eugenics-and-professional-identity-u-toronto-press-2019. Her research on women doctors has also appeared in the Journal of Women's History (Spring 2017) and Women and Science, 17th Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists and Protagonists (Cambridge Scholars, 2011). 

She lives in Richmond, Virginia.