Victoria J Barnett

Victoria J. Barnett is a writer, translator, teacher, and scholar. From 2004-2019 she served as the Director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was also one of the general editors of the multivolume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, published by Fortress Press. She has lectured internationally and has taught courses at Union Theological Seminary in New York and Princeton Theological Seminary. From 2022-2023 she was the Frank Talbott, Jr. Endowed Visiting Professor in Jewish and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

 

Her work focuses on religion, ideology, and conflict, with a special focus on the history of Protestant churches during the Nazi era. She is internationally recognized as an expert on the history of the German Protestant churches during the Nazi era as well as on the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her published books include After Ten Years: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times (2017), For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (1992), and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (2000). She is the translator of several works, including Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (2021), by Christiane Tietz.

 

More recently she has written about the Protestant ecumenical movement and interreligious movements in the early twentieth century:

• "From World War I to the Holocaust, 1914-1948," in A Documentary History of Jewish-Christian Relations. Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
• "The Christian Churches, the Nazi State, and the Holocaust," in The Routledge Handbook on Religion and Genocide. Stephen Smith and Sara Brown, eds. Taylor and Francis, 2021.
• "Ecumenical Protestant Responses to the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s," in Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Fascism. Rebecca Carter-Chand and Kevin Spicer, eds. McGill University Press, 2021.

She is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Authors Guild, the Council of Centers on Christian-Jewish-Relations, and the International Bonhoeffer Society.