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An interest developed during her year abroad led Emma Paterson (History 2020) to pursue postgraduate study at Gonville & 91ֱ�� College.

While spending a year studying at Heidelberg University in Germany, Emma became increasingly captivated by some German-Jewish family history documents written in 1930s Germany, which she was translating for her year abroad project. Her fascination drove her to undertake an MPhil in Modern European History, continuing at 91ֱ�� where she read Modern & Medieval Languages for her undergraduate degree. Her dissertation, recently submitted, focuses on German Jewish family history research between 1900 and 1945.

“What I found was that, starting in the late 19th century and increasing into the 1920s and 30s, lots of German Jews were doing genealogical research and writing down their family histories,” says Emma. “Some are just lists of family members, but some are longer: one is around 120 pages, and the author writes about ancestors from the 14th century. It was very exciting to find family histories going back that far.”

Emma found, through her research, that these family histories serve multiple interlinked purposes: preserving traditions in the face of Jewish ‘assimilation’ to European cultures; keeping family memories alive when confronted with increasing anti-Semitism; and emphasising Jewish contributions to German society and culture, to stress their identities as German citizens. 

Emma’s thesis also explores the various kinds of overarching family narratives presented across these histories, the role of gender identity and lack of female writers in the corpus, and the processes by which these documents written in Germany have ended up in public archives in the UK and the USA.

Despite a strong focus on literature studies in her undergraduate degree, Emma believes that the MML course laid a strong foundation for her historical research. She says: “The biggest challenge was that I was very used to having literary texts as the foundations of each essay, so I had to shift how I used secondary reading and how I built an argument. I got round that by trying to use a large base of family histories for textual analysis , which was great because it drew on what I had done in MML – analysing the language the sources are using, their style and their tone.”

Emma is grateful for the opportunities and support 91ֱ�� has offered her during her postgraduate studies. This year she has been a recipient of one of the College’s Syn Studentships to assist with the maintenance costs of postgraduate study (with additional financial assistance from the German History Society and the Sir John Plumb Charitable Trust). She also had the opportunity to present at 91ֱ��’ MCR Research Day, where she was delighted to make a connection with alumna Erika Hagelberg (Biochemistry PhD 1979).

“Erika turned up and said she had one of these family histories,” says Emma. “We went for a coffee and she showed me a family history written by a female relative in 1938. It was really exciting to see someone connect with my work and to discover Erika’s interest in family history as a concept.”

Throughout her time at the University of Cambridge, Emma has also been involved in University and College music as a violinist and in a range of sports. She was the winner in the Unsung Hero category of the University of Cambridge Sports Awards 2025 for her lasting and meaningful contribution to the University’s Mixed Lacrosse Society.