Karen Uslin is currently Director of Research for the Defiant Requiem Foundation in addition to her teaching various music and music history classes at Catholic University. She received her Ph.D. in musicology from The Catholic University of America in 2015, her Bachelor’s in Music and Theater from Muhlenberg College in 2004 and her Masters in Music History from Temple University in 2006.

Karen’s areas of expertise and research interests include music from the Holocaust and the Terezín concentration camp, music traditions from the city of Philadelphia, and most recently Jewish cultural life in Sweden. In March of 2022 Karen spent a month as a visiting fellow at the Hugo Valentin Center of Uppsala University, where she researched the history of Jewish culture in Sweden and how it was affected by World War II and post-war immigration to Sweden. In addition to academic research, Karen also speaks at churches and synagogues on Jewish-Christian relations.

Karen has presented at various conferences both nationally and internationally, including for the American Musicological Society, the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. She is also a frequent guest lecturer at various academic and non-academic organizations around the world.

In addition to research and speaking, Karen also has an active performance career, having sung at various venues both nationally and internationally including the Vatican, the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and other concert venues in Canada and Europe. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Karen currently resides in Silver Spring, MD.