Bieke Van Camp is a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France). She earned her BA in Italian Studies from the University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier and Master’s Research Degrees in Military History, Italian Studies and History from the same university. Her research focuses on the socio-history of societies in war, the experience of Western European Jews in Nazi concentration and extermination camps, and the use of testimony and digital technologies in the social sciences. Van Camp has extensive research and teaching experience and has also served as the 2016-2017 European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellow, as the PhD representative of the board of the research center CRISES: Experimental Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, and as a member of the research project CORAL: Corpus in the Digital Age. 

During her residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Van Camp will consult 96 VHA testimonies from Italy and the Netherlands. She plans to use a socio-historical approach that utilizes factor analysis and social network analysis to understand what she calls “the enigma of survival” – why some deportees survived concentration camp society while others did not.