Ph.D. candidate in History, University of Virginia, USA
A native Israeli, Ms. Jackobson-Girshengorn is currently preparing a dissertation entitled, “Not Drawn to Scale: Maps and the Holocaust, 1939 to the Present.” In this current project, she explores cartographic practices and visual representations of the Holocaust during and after World War II. Moving both chronologically and thematically, the project examines the meanings and functions of maps in the persecution and extermination of the Jews in historical, memorial, judicial, literary and scholarly contexts. Reading maps as spatial interpretations of genocide, she analyzes a broad range of sources and asks how maps form and reflect policies of genocide, including what one can learn from maps about the motivations of perpetrators and collaborators and the experiences of victims and survivors; how the Holocaust has been represented in maps; and how maps were employed in post-war Holocaust research and commemoration. In posing and answering these questions, Ms. Jackobson-Girshengorn aims to deepen our emerging understanding of the still untapped visual and spatial dimensions of the Holocaust. Ms. Jackobson-Girshengorn has English, German and Hebrew language skills. Her dissertation advisor is Professor Alon Confino.