2018/19

Lukas Meissel

PhD in Holocaust Studies, University of Haifa

Lukas Meissel is a PhD candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Meissel earned his BA in History at the University of Vienna and his MA in contemporary history at the same university, where he wrote his thesis on photography of Mauthausen. Before beginning his PhD at the University of Haifa, Meissel worked as an historian in the Jewish community archive of Vienna, as a guide to the Mauthausen memorial, and as a project worker for Yad Vashem in Vienna. He has received many awards, including a full PhD scholarship from the University of Haifa and the 2017 Yad Vashem Scholarship, and has given lectures at conferences including Lessons and Legacies XII and the international conference “Photographs from the Camps of the Nazi Regime.” He has published seven journal articles and over a dozen encyclopedia entries.

During his month at the Center, Meissel plans to use the Visual History Archive testimonies to add counternarratives to the research he has conducted about photography in concentration camps. Perpetrators produced most of the photographs of the Holocaust we have today, and Meissel argues that these camp photographs were used to create specific images that excluded significant aspects of the camps’ reality. Meissel hopes that by juxtaposing the images taken by perpetrators with the perspectives of victims he will be able to contextualize the one-sided visual documentation of the Holocaust and break the visual narrative of its perpetrators. He plans to explore the Visual History Archive to unearth the experiences of those being photographed in order to understand more about the circumstances of the production of the photographs, the intentions of the SS photographers, and what is missing from the perpetrators’ photographic record.

To learn more about Lukas Meissel click here.

2017/18

Irina Rebrova

PhD in History, Technical University, Berlin

Irina Rebrova is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Technical University in Berlin, Germany. The working title of her thesis is “Memory about the Holocaust in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Discourses on World War II (the Case of North Caucasus)”. She holds a Russian degree (candidate of science in history) and MA in sociology (Gender studies). Rebrova also holds an MA in sociology from European Humanities University and has completed fellowships at the Claims Conference, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

Rebrova researched the process of remembrance and translation of the memory about the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, South of Russia, during her time in residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She studied the mechanism of storytelling by Holocaust survivors interviewed by the Shoah Foundation in the early Post-Soviet states in the 1990s. Most of the Soviet Jews lived their whole lives (or the significant part their adult lives before it could be possible to emigrate after the breakup of the USSR) in the Soviet Union, where the theme of mass extermination of the Jews especially within the internal borders has been silenced. In this context, Rebrova’s research explored the role of these interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and wider in the post-Soviet society.

To watch Irina Rebrova's lecture click here.

To learn more about Irina Rebrova click here.

2016/17

Katja Schatte

Impact in Profile: Katja Schatte

PhD in East German Jewish History, University of Washington

Katja Schatte is pursuing a Ph.D. in East German Jewish History at the University of Washington. Her dissertation in progress, entitled “‘Don’t We All Have a Responsibility in This World?’ Jewish Women’s Lives and Identities in East Berlin, 1945-1990,” focuses on female Holocaust survivors, memory, post-memory, and trans-generational trauma. 

At the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Schatte expands her research and analysis of East Jewish German life to include scholars, writers, teachers, artists, and journalists in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and post-GDR. She touches on issues such as the relationship between the second and third generations of East German Jews, scholarly and community debates about contemporary and East German Jewish identity, Holocaust memory, and the effects of trauma and exile across generations.

To watch her lecture click here.

To learn more about Katja Schatte click here.