Cora Granata, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of History

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Teaching interests: modern Germany, Europe Since 1945, cultural minorities, nationalism, and racism in modern European history, Holocaust and memory

Research interests: cultural minorities and nationalism in the German Democratic Republic

Brief biography: Dr. Granata received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and her M.A. in 1996 from the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. In 2001, she earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and that fall joined the History Department at Cal State Fullerton. In addition to her teaching in history, she serves as Director of European Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Oral and Public History. Dr. Granata's research focuses on cultural minorities and nationalism in the German Democratic Republic. She is the author of several articles on the history of cultural minorities in postwar Germany. In addition, her book, The Human Tradition in Modern Europe, co-edited with Dr. Cheryl A. Koos, uses biography to illustrate broader trends in modern European history and appeared with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2008. Her current research is a book manuscript titled Celebration and Suspicion: Jews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic. This project is a comparative study of two cultural minorities in the Soviet Occupied Zone and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1945 to 1989. It combines use of archival evidence, in particular communist party and secret police (Stasi) documents, with extensive oral interviews of Jews and Sorbs, the latter a small Slavic-speaking minority in East Germany. The book shows how members of these communities both adapted to and resisted state policies as they sought to create meaningful lives behind the Iron Curtain. Challenging current historiography, it reveals the existence of complex interplay between state and everyday society in the GDR dictatorship.

Dr. Granata has been the recipient of numerous international fellowships and honors, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bundeskanzler Fellowship, the DAAD Fellowship, a US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Grant, in addition to being selected as a finalist for the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize in Modern German History. Before deciding to become a historian, she worked in 1992-1993 as a legislative intern in the German Bundestag (Parliament). In her office you can find pieces of the Berlin Wall that she chipped away herself.