Sara Poulin

My research centers on the Holocaust and the Second World War. I am interested in telling the story of not just how the Holocaust happened but why it happened and why that continues to be important not just to historians studying this period but to everyone still today. For my dissertation, I am examining Canada's role in the liberation of the concentration and transit camps in western Europe throughout the spring of 1945. So often we link the end of the Second World War to the end of the Holocaust and the legacy of liberation shows us that was not the case. Connecting my research of the Holocaust to Canadian history allows me to present liberation in a new way, and shows the greater role of Canada in the Second World War away from the battlefield.

Apart from my doctoral research, my other fields of interests include twentieth-century European history, Canadian social history, and war and society.