PhD candidate, University of Southern California, USA
Alexia M. Orengo Green is a PhD candidate in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California, where she also received a Graduate Certificate in Jewish Studies. She holds a BA in History and Archaeology from Dickinson College and an MA in Public History from New York University. In addition to her academic work, Orengo Green conducts interviews for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) and has participated in multiple oral history works, including the NEH-supported project “Memory & History: Transforming the Narrative of the Spanish Civil War & Francoist Dictatorship.”
Orengo Green has been awarded multiple fellowships and research grants such as the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship from USC’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the Fritz Thyssen Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from the German Historical Institute, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, Shoah Foundation’s Steve and Sandy Cozen Graduate Fellowship, the Dr. Gabriele Meyer Fellowship from the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden in Hamburg, and the Junior Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies from the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Germany.
Orengo Green’s dissertation, “Mediators of Migrations,” examines the experiences of Jewish children who escaped Nazi Germany and went to Latin America during the Holocaust. Through this focus, Orengo Green demonstrates that during migration, Jewish children had agency as they became a key part of the migration process while also being interlocutors of culture, racial perceptions, and language to their families and the German Jewish refugee community.