Doris Bergen

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Doris Leanna Bergen (born October 19, 1960) is a Canadian historian who studies the Holocaust. She is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, the only endowed chair in Canada dedicated to Holocaust history. She also serves on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2018.

Bergen grew up in Saskatchewan in a Mennonite family with German and Ukrainian roots. Her parents fled Ukraine in the 1920s, and she has relatives in Europe who witnessed the Holocaust. She earned a BA from the University of Saskatchewan in 1982, an MA in Modern European History from the University of Alberta in 1984, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995, advised by Gerhard Weinberg. Her dissertation explored the German Christian movement during the Nazi era.

Her career began at the University of Vermont in 1991, with visiting teaching at universities in Warsaw, Tuzla, and Pristina. She joined the University of Notre Dame in 1996, focusing on 20th-century German history, the Nazi period, the Holocaust, and women’s history. She held fellowships at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1997 and at Northwestern University in 1999. In 2003 she published War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust.

In 2007 Bergen moved to the University of Toronto as a full professor and took the Chancellor chair. She has received several honors, including the Graduate History Society Distinguished Service Award (2008) and the Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize (2012). She has led and supported Holocaust education and memory projects, such as the National Holocaust Monument design team in Ottawa (2014). In 2017 she collaborated with photographer Edward Burtynsky on the book Chai, about Holocaust sites. She also serves on editorial boards and policy committees related to genocide studies.

Bergen emphasizes that the Holocaust affected many groups beyond Jews, including the disabled, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and Polish civilians.