Susanne C. Knittel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York (2011). Her research examines how societies remember atrocities, with a particular focus on the uncomfortable questions of guilt, responsibility, and complicity, and on the role that literature, art, film, and other cultural forms play in shaping public memory. Across her work, she is especially attentive to forms of violence that resist easy narration and accountability, including state crime, colonial violence, and environmental destruction.

She is the author of The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham University Press, 2015), a comparative analysis of German and Italian Holocaust memory that focuses on the difficult legacies of the Nazi “euthanasia” program and Italian Fascist eugenic racism. In 2016, the book received an Honorable Mention from the Council of European Studies for the European Studies Book Award. The German translation, Unheimliche Geschichte: Grafeneck, Triest und die Politik der Holocausterinnerung, was published with Transcript in 2018. She is also co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (with Zachary J. Goldberg).

Susanne is the organizer of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and co-director, together with Liesbeth van de Grift, of the Utrecht Network for Environmental Humanities. She is the founder and director of the Perpetrator Studies Network, an international and interdisciplinary platform that connects scholars from the humanities, social sciences, law,, and psychology with curators, artists, and educators from Europe and beyond. She is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed open-access Journal of Perpetrator Research, which she co-founded in 2017 with Emiliano Perra and Uğur Ümit Üngör.

She is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination, which investigates how contemporary culture grapples with responsibility for ecological violence and how it reveals the deep historical entanglements between environmental destruction and other forms of violence, particularly colonialism and genocide. Bringing together cultural memory studies, new materialism, and ecocriticism, the project develops an innovative ecological model for understanding violence, its representation, and its afterlives.

Between 2022 and 2025, Susanne was one of the project leaders of Conceptualizing Ecocide, a Pathways to Sustainability Signature Project exploring the legal, ecological, historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions of ecocide. Within this project, she led the theatre-based research experiment This Is Not a Trial, staged in June 2025 at ZIMIHC Theater Stefanus in Utrecht. Framed as a fictional courtroom, the project brought together students, artists, researchers, and members of the public to explore what ecocide prosecution might look like in practice and to engage audiences in debates about accountability, ecological justice, and the role of law and art in responding to environmental crisis.

Susanne also featured in and served as an advisory board member for the award-winning documentary film Disposable Humanity (dir. Cameron S. Mitchell, USA, 2025), which premiered in February 2025 at the Slamdance Film Festival. The film examines the Nazi Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program and its role in paving the way for the Holocaust, foregrounding the systematic murder of disabled people and the longer histories of dehumanization that enabled such violence. Combining historical analysis with survivor and family testimony, Disposable Humanity has received multiple awards and significant international recognition at film festivals across the United States.

From 2016 to 2022, Susanne was a member of the Utrecht Young Academy and served as its chair from 2017 to 2020. She is also a co-founder of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) and served on its board until 2022. CUCo, an initiative of the Young Academies of the strategic alliance between Utrecht University, UMC Utrecht, TU Eindhoven, and Wageningen University & Research, promotes and facilitates unconventional research collaborations with a strong orientation toward societal impact.