Erin Mizrahi is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. Her research focused on silence in testimonies, to support her multidisciplinary doctoral project on forms of memorialization, witnessing, protest and art through silence.

At the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Mizrahi used the Visual History Archive to identify different types of silence, such as omissions in an interviewee’s storytelling, reluctance to speak, impossibility of speaking, silence of the other, and silence as a means of survival. “[I’m looking at] not only silence in testimonies but silence as testimony, reimagining our understanding of silence as a theoretical approach to testimony and witnessing,” Mizrahi said. “Silence as a language and a mark of survival.”