[11] Baer left Chestertown in 1992 and accepted two administrative positions at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, as the faculty dean and vice president of academic affairs.
[12][13] In 2004, she was designated as the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies by Stockton State College in Galloway, New Jersey,[14] and held the post again between 2016 and 2017, teaching on genocide and gender.
[15] Expanding her research into other conflicts, in 2012, Baer analyzed the Rwandan genocide and organized a class and lecture series about the Dakota War of 1862.
[16] Two years later, she was appointed as research professor of English and African Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College,[15][17] and subsequently also became a researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.[15][18] While she was working at Washington College, Baer was focused on transcribing nineteenth-century women's diaries,[10] to evaluate the experiences of women impacted by war.
[19][20] The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women, edited by Baer and her daughter evaluated the memoir of Nanda Herbermann, which had originally been published in 1946.
Baer and her daughter provided context of Herberman's background noting that her privilege as an Aryan with internalized anti-Semitism made her story an unusual Holocaust memoir of life in a concentration camp.
[15][27] The book traces the history of the golem's metamorphosis from a Jewish protector to an evil creature,[28] and analyzes how various interpretations of it have been manipulated to evaluate human nature, what is divine, and even social justice.
[30][18] By analyzing literary works, Baer noted the shared characteristics of racism, concentration and death camps, dehumanization, forced labor, medical experimentation, deliberate starvation, and rape, among others in the policies of the administrators of German South West Africa and Nazi Germany.