Abigail Lewis

Affiliated Scholar 2024

Abigail Lewis is the executive director of the Council for European Studies (CES), one of the major European studies associations to which the Nanovic Institute belongs. Before assuming this role in 2024, she served as director of undergraduate studies and postdoctoral research fellow for the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Abby Lewis received a Ph.D. in European history in 2022 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. in history in 2012 from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focuses on photography and the politics of memory in post-World War II Europe. She researches how art, photographs, and material culture provide lenses into experiences of warfare and occupation. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled, Double Exposure: French Photography and Everyday Choices from Nazi Occupation to Liberation. Her book explores the complex and individual experiences of photographers under Nazi Occupation in France. It also examines how photographs as evidence have shaped French collective memory since 1945. Her research has been supported by the French Embassy in the United States, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophone d’Amérique, the DAAD, and the George L. Mosse Foundation in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.