Education:
M.A. Candidate in European Studies; University of Virginia (2026)
B.A. Candidate in German and Foreign Affairs, Minor in History; University of Virginia (2025) 
 

Brendan is a current fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Virginia double majoring in German and Foreign Affairs with a minor in History. For his Distinguished Majors Thesis in German, he is researching post-1949 collective memory in order to explain the mainstream parties’ refusal to include the institutionalized far-right in coalitions in the national parliament. He is most interested in far-right nationalism, genocide studies, and memory politics. With plans to travel to Freiburg, Germany in Fall 2025, he wants to compare the institutionalized German and Dutch far-right and their uses of memory politics in campaign messaging for his European Studies MA thesis.