Chiara Renzo

Chiara Renzo
Chiara Renzo

Ph. D Candidate, History, Universities of Florence and Siena (Italy)

Chiara Renzo’s dissertation focuses on Jewish displacement in Italy after War World II. Her research aims at tracing the history of non-Italian Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who, between 1943 and 1951, found a temporary refuge in Italy.

Ms. Renzo is investigating the life conditions of Jewish DPs in refugee camps, as well as the relief and rehabilitation programs provided by the network of institutional and private organizations that rescued them.  With the help of post-war refugees’ historical agencies, Chiara Renzo explores the Jewish DPs’ political, social and cultural role and their relationships with both the Jewish institutions and the Jewish voluntary organizations.

Chiara Renzo combines the institutional documentation with what was produced by the Jewish DPs themselves. Her dissertation will mainly be based on primary sources in Italian, English and Hebrew available in several archives in Italy, Israel and the United Kingdom.

Chiara Renzo received support from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), through which she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide in London (April 2016). She spent the second year (2015) of her Ph.D program in Jerusalem, where she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University and then at the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research.

Currently, Chiara Renzo is completing her Ph.D dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Nicola Labanca (University of Siena) and Prof. Hagit Lavsky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem).