FASPE Case Development Social Impact Fellowship

Fellowship Description

FASPE utilizes the case method as its pedagogical approach. Cases are built around the activities and motivations of individual professionals and institutions that were influential in the design, enablement or execution of the policies of National Socialism in Germany (1933-1945). The Project entails the development of new cases, thus research into Nazi era individuals and institutions whose activities provide a context for discussion of contemporary ethical issues in the professions.

Specific Tasks

Identify individuals and institutions that may be of interest.
Conduct research on the identified individuals and institutions, seeking particular information about their activities, their underlying decision-making and the motivations behind the activities; and how to think about that background in the context of ethical behavior within the particular profession.
Conduct general research around the normative and moral orientations that led professionals to becoming accomplices and perpetrators.
Conduct research into the complex world of professionals in the situation of occupation, e.g. in Poland, the Netherlands, etc., also in terms of the ethics of collaboration and complicity.
Establish a connection between the historic example and themes and situations that are relevant in the particular profession today.
Collaboration: Fellowship will be conducted in dialogue and collaboration with historians (including Thorsten Wagner) and FASPE faculty within the particular professions.
Academic Focus: History; German language reading skills would be an advantage.

Your Host

Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics

FASPE challenges graduate students and future leaders to recognize and confront their ethical responsibilities as professionals by analyzing the decisions and actions of Nazi-era professionals. In 2023, FASPE will award fellowships to 80-90 individuals out of a large pool of applicants from across the United States and abroad. FASPE’s fellowship programs are led by distinguished faculty comprised of university professors and practicing professionals in the five disciplines, along with leading ethicists and historians who have specific expertise in the role of the professions in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe from 1933 to 1945.

Fellowship Mentor

Thorsten Wagner

Executive Director for Strategy and Academics, Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE)

Thorsten Wagner: German historian, born 1970 in Sønderborg, Denmark. Undergraduate studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany, graduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin. Postgraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Being based in Berlin 1993-2010, he held positions as educator at the Jewish Museum of Berlin, and as a research fellow at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Copenhagen, and at the Department of Scandinavian Studies, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.