Deadline Extended to February 15, 2023: Call for Applications for USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies

USC Shoah Foundation invites applications from advanced-level PhD candidates for the 2023-2024 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies.

The fellowship is open to candidates from any university and from all disciplines. It provides $4,000 in support and year-long access to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) for conducting research about antisemitism, including its causes, representations, and consequences. In addition, the Institute will cover the fellow’s registration costs for an academic conference of their choice for the selected fellow to share their research with wider scholarly community during the 2023/2024 academic year.

The fellow will be expected to spend one month in residence at the Institute during the 2023/2024 academic year. During their residency, the fellow will be expected to produce a research report based on their findings, to write an op-ed for the Institute’s website, to give a public presentation about their work at the end of the residency, and to participate in the activities at the Institute. Additional outputs will be determined in consultation with the selected fellow based on the nature of their project.

The fellowship project can focus on either historic or contemporary antisemitism, or both, and should rely on oral history testimonies housed in the VHA and/or other related Institute and USC resources and collections.

Award decisions for the fellowship will be based on the originality of the research proposal and the centrality of the Institute’s and other USC resources to the research project. While the Institute welcomes all proposals, it is especially interested in applied research proposals whose goal is to examine the existing or propose new solutions for countering antisemitism in all its forms.

All proposals need to be either grounded in or make use of testimony (traditional and its derivatives, such as the Institute’s Dimensions in Testimony), and preference will be given to interdisciplinary research projects.

The VHA is an online repository of over 55,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, including the Rwandan, Armenian, Guatemalan, Cambodian genocides, the Nanjing Massacre in China, and anti-Rohingya mass violence, and others. The majority of these are life history interviews in which interviewees discuss their lives before, during, and after genocide and mass violence. The topic of antisemitism is discussed in over 20,000 VHA testimonies, making it one of the world's largest social history sources for the study of antisemitism in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to Holocaust testimonies, the archive also houses a growing collection of testimonies about contemporary experiences of antisemitism.

To learn more about the Institute’s work on antisemitism, please visit https://sfi.usc.edu/focalpoint/antisemitism.

The Institute is also the home to its testimony-based educational platform IWitness, and several testimony-based innovations, including Dimensions in Testimony, 360 Testimony on Location, and VR experiences. For more information about the Institute and its work, please visit https://sfi.usc.edu/. Besides the Institute’s resources, the selected fellow is invited to benefit from internationally unique and growing research resources at USC.

Applications are due on February 15, 2023.

To apply, please send the following documents to pitic@usc.edu:

• cover letter (including proposed dates of residency)
• current CV
• research proposal (1-3 pages), which should include a project outline, a description of methodology, and the resource(s) to be used
• recommendation letter from a faculty advisor to be emailed by the advisor to pitic@usc.edu.

Applicants will be notified about award decisions by March 15, 2023.

For any questions about the fellowship, please email pitic@usc.edu.