Dr. Allison Somogyi’s doctoral research analyzed the survival and resistance tactics employed by young Jewish women in Budapest under Arrow Cross rule and Nazi occupation and traced, through their diaries, how they navigated the fraught space available to them in the chaotic months of Nazi occupation and during the siege of Budapest. Her postdoctoral project builds off this research by exploring the differences in the ways Hungarian-Jewish women discussed sexual violence at the time of the Final Solution and throughout its aftermath.
During the 2019–2020 academic year, Somogyi was a joint Yale-USC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University ...
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Alma Huselja is a PhD candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Building a Fascist State: ‘Aryanization’ in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941—1945.”
Huselja’s dissertation examines the campaigns of property expropriation and redistribution along racial lines as organized by the Ustaša leadership of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Namely, she is interested in both the intended aims of the Ustaša’s expropriation campaigns as well as their implementation and variations, at regional and local levels. While highlighting expropriation as an Ustaša tactic to elucidate their ideology and cultivate loyalty in their attempt to create a ...
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Daan de Leeuw is a PhD Candidate in History at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. His dissertation “The Geography of Slave Labor: Dutch Jews and the Third Reich, 1942-1945,” supervised by Prof. Debórah Dwork, investigates the trajectories of Dutch Jewish slave laborers through German concentration and annihilation camps. Drawing on survivor testimonies and Nazi administrative records, de Leeuw examines the movement of prisoners from camp to camp and how these transfers affected the social structures inmates created among themselves. Focusing on 9 out of the 103 transports that left the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944, he applies Geographic Information ...
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Justina Smalkyté is a PhD candidate at the Sciences Po Center for History in Paris where she is preparing a dissertation on anti-Nazi resistance movements in German-occupied Lithuania (1941-1944). She holds a double MA in European History from Université Paris Cité and Humboldt University of Berlin and a BA in History from Vilnius University.
Her doctoral research examines anti-Nazi resistance through the lens of material culture: while focusing on a wide range of material objects used by resistance members her thesis attempts to shed a new light on practices of resistance and violence in Lithuania under German occupation. Focusing on the Generalbezirk Litauen which was administered ...
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Lilia Tomchuk is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is a native speaker of Ukrainian and Russian and her research interests include the Holocaust in occupied Ukraine, gender and sexuality history, and the history of childhood. Currently, Tomchuk is working on her dissertation, “Shades of Agency – Choice, Survival and Resistance of Jewish Women During the Holocaust in Transnistria” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher.
In her dissertation, Tomchuk examines the agency of Jewish women in different contexts and under varying and changing conditions during the Holocaust in Romanian-occupied Transnistria. Her project addresses key ...
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Dr. Marie Moutier-Bitan graduated from the Sorbonne and EHESS. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at CERCEC as part of the Visual History of the Holocaust project. She is a historian specialized in the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union. For more than 10 years she worked as a researcher in the Yahad-In Unum association, led by Father Patrick Desbois. As a team leader and interviewer, Moutier-Bitan made more than twenty research trips to Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, and Lithuania. The assignments comprised interviewing witnesses to the extermination of Jews and locating shooting sites. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Denis Peschanski, focused on ...
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Michał Kowalski is a PhD Student at the University of Wrocław in Poland where he works on his doctoral dissertation, “Poisoned land. Life of the local Polish and Jewish communities in the shadow of the Treblinka I and Treblinka II camps.” Kowalski is a researcher, journalist, and lawyer.
He has been involved mainly in investigative journalism and historical reporting and worked as a court reporter. He wrote several dozen reportages (using a micro-historic perspective) about the life of the inhabitants of a small town in Central Pomerania, which became part of Poland after World War II.
After years of legal practice, Kowalski has decided to do research ...
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Na’ama Seri-Levi holds a PhD in Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Prof. Yfaat Weiss and Prof. Eli Lederhendler, deals with Polish- Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union during World War II and focuses on the refugees’ networks and their connections with the Jewish world outside the Soviet Union. Her research interests include migration, the geographical aspects of WWII, and historical memory.
Seri-Levi’s current project, “Remapping Wandering Routes,” is an expansion of her interest in this immense group of refugees, concentrating on the geographical and spatial experiences and aspects of their story. ...
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Nicolas Garraud is a PhD Student at the University of Oxford. His research explores the meaning and significance of humor and laughter in the everyday life of Jews living under Nazi occupation in the Warsaw ghetto. Garraud’s doctoral project relies on the extensive use of first-hand accounts of victims of Nazi policies of discrimination and extermination. Especially, he is working with documents written in Polish and Yiddish found in the Ringelblum Archive, often not published and not translated into the English language, and uses diaries, notes, and letters as central prisms of historical analysis. Borrowing from methodological tools found in the practice of social and ...
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