Dr Laura Tradii

Laura is a historian of modern Europe specialising on the Second World War and the Cold War. She researches the practices, debates, and ethics pertaining to the management and disposal of fallen soldiers in the First and Second World Wars.

She is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History, where she researches the long afterlives of mass death at total war in East Germany (1945 – 1990). She is currently writing a book, Fallen of Total Defeat: German war dead in socialist East Germany, 1945-90, which explores the treatment of German fallen soldiers on GDR soil during the Cold War.

Before joining Kent, she was a research associate at London School of Economics in the Wellcome Trust project Human Rights / Human Remains. She researched the history of forensic anthropological practices, and how these entered the management of the dead.

She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (2021), sponsored by a Vice-Chancellor’s Award, and a MSc in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology from the University of Oxford.

Her research interests include war history, the history of medicine and technology, exhumations, and the Cold War. 

Laura teaches in a variety of courses on war and postwar history.