Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities and an affiliated scholar of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. 

As a Graduate Summer Research Fellow at the Center, Zalewska focused her energy on a new research project: “Digital Topography of Memory: Reimagining Landscapes of pre-Holocaust Poland.” The project engaged with the Institute’s Visual History Archive by comparing the memories of the pre-World War II spaces in which Poles and Jews interacted in testimony with their cinematically narrativized counterparts. To narrow her research, Zalewska specifically looked at the eighteen villages and towns scattered throughout the Polish countryside that are portrayed in the documentary film Po-Lin (2008), by Jolanta Dylewska.