Anastasiia Simferovska is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures/Jewish Studies Cluster Program at Northwestern University (USA). She holds a PhD in Art History from the Lviv National Academy of Arts (Ukraine) and an MA in Slavic Literatures from Northwestern University. In her dissertation, “Tracing the Holocaust Text: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Making of an Eyewitness in Postwar East Europe,” Anastasiia examines the problems of authorship, authenticity, and image migration in visual and verbal Holocaust texts in East Europe in the wake of World War II. She questions the function and semantics of artistic mimicry, borrowing, plagiarism, and cultural appropriation in the context of war, genocide, and censorship. Anastasiia’s publications appeared in the Journal for Holocaust Research (Dapim), Holocaust Studies: Ukrainian Focus, and Ars Judaica. Her research has been supported by the EHRI-ERIC Conny Kristel Fellowship (2026), the Kurt and Thea Sonnenmark Memorial Fellowship at the USHMM (2025), the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (2022), and the NU Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies (2016, 2019).
PhD Institution: Northwestern University
Doctoral Research: Holocaust representation in art and literature in Poland and the USSR, 1944-1991