Laura Brade

Laura teaches history in the Upper School, including the 11th Grade course on the history of the United States, as well electives like Case Studies in American Women’s History and Current Events. 

In 2017, Laura began working as an Assistant Professor of History at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, where she taught courses on Modern European History, the Holocaust, and Refugees and Displacement. In 2019, she became the Director of the Albion College Holocaust Studies Service Learning Project, which combined a semester-long course on the Holocaust in Poland with a two-week trip to Poland. “We worked with the New Jewish Cemetery and the Jewish Community in Wroclaw, Poland, to restore the cemetery by pulling saplings, clearing debris, and uncovering headstones. We also visited Holocaust-related sites in Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Warsaw.” 

Laura served as a researcher for the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and as a consultant for a 60 Minutes special on Nicholas Winton, who helped rescue 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. She has also served as an interviewer for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Laura holds a B.A. in History and German with a minor in Mathematics from Pacific Lutheran University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Modern European History, both from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2023, she received a certificate in Data Science from the Erdos Institute. In her free time, Laura is working on two book manuscripts: Data Detectives: Teaching Data Analysis in the History Classroom and Networks of Escape: Jewish Flight from Nazi-Occupied Central Europe. Her two children keep her busy the rest of her time — they enjoy hiking and geocaching as a family. She also swims with the Columbia Master’s Swim Team.