Professor Sarah Gensburger Named the 2025-2026 Shapiro Scholar in Residence
Sarah Gensburger, Professor of Political Science and History at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Sciences Po Paris, will serve as the 2025-2026 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will spend over a week in residence at the Center in April and will deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture entitled “Homes as Witnesses of the Holocaust in Paris” on April 14, 2026.
“We are delighted to welcome Sarah Gensburger as this year’s Shapiro Scholar in Residence,” said Center Founding Director, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, and Professor of History Wolf Gruner. “Her groundbreaking research on the micro-history of the Holocaust in Paris down to the individual apartment level uncovers not only the persecution of Jews in and by the French society, but also Parisian Jews’ postwar struggles for repatriation and restitution.”
In the annual distinguished lecture, Gensburger will share the research from the recently published book Appartements témoins. La spoliation des locataires juifs à Paris, 1940-1946, co-written with Isabelle Backouche and Eric le Bourhis (La Découverte, 2025). The book was awarded the Albertine Translation Grant 2025 and will be published in English by Rutgers University Press in 2027
As a political scientist, Gensburger has been studying the public policies of remembrance and their feedback in a critical perspective. As a historian, she is a specialist in the micro-history of the Holocaust in Paris, using space and geography to study social interactions in time of crises
Gensburger is the author of 15 books, including Beyond Memory: Can We Really Learn from the Past, Palgrave, 2020, with Sandrine Lefranc; Memory on my Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (Paris, 2015-2016), Leuven University Press, 2019; Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris 1940-1944, Indiana University Press, 2015 and National Policy, Global Memory: The Commemoration of the Righteous among the Nations from Jerusalem to Paris, Berghahn Books, 2016. Her books, articles, and book chapters have been published in French, English, Polish, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and German.
Gensburger’s scholarship has received significant national and international recognition. Among the honors she has received, she was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal, a national distinction for highly promising early career scholars. For her article entitled “Picturing the Looting of Jewish Belongings During the Holocaust: What Can History Do With Images?”, she received the Best Article Award from Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust. For her dissertation on the process of remembrance through the title of Righteous among the Nations, she won the French Political Science Association Prize for best dissertation, as well as an honorable mention in the Auschwitz Foundation’s thesis competition. Her book Memory on my Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (Paris, 2015-2016) earned the French Voices Award
Between 2021 and 2024, she served as the president of the international Memory Studies Association. She has served on numerous editorial boards and scientific committees, including for the Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention at the American University in Paris, the Memory Commission of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and the Izieu House.
As part of her commitment to communicate with broad audiences outside of academia, she has undertaken many projects as a public historian and digital humanist, including blogs, op-eds, soundwalks, podcasts, and museum exhibitions. She created, co-created, and/or produced several immersive audio series, which allow users to experience history in Paris by exploring a neighborhood, a street, a building while listening to the audio that gives voice to the people who lived there. These series include “Voices from the Holocaust in Paris.” Explore others here. She has curated exhibitions or written exhibition catalogues for several museums. The exhibition she curated at City Hall in Paris entitled “C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetage des enfants juifs à Paris” (“They were children. The deportation and rescue of Jewish children in Paris”) received 200,000 visitors. During the COVID pandemic, she co-created a participatory database entitled “Vitrines en confinement” (“Windows in Lockdown”) for people to share photos of public spaces and create a collective memorial of this period of history.
Intended to inspire prominent scholars, the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund was established through a gift by longtime USC Shoah Foundation Executive Committee and Board of Councilors member Mickey Shapiro. The fund enables one senior scholar to spend time in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and to deliver a public lecture during their visit to USC. This prestigious fellowship for luminaries in the field of Holocaust Studies is available through invitation only.
The fellowship offers senior scholars the opportunity to use the unique Holocaust and genocide research resources at USC, including the Holocaust and Genocide Studies book collection, archival collections in Special Collections, and the Visual History Archive, which contains more than 57,000 testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, including the testimony of Sara Shapiro.
Gensburger is the tenth Shapiro Scholar in Residence, following previous Shapiro Scholars Atina Grossmann (2024-2025), Dan Stone (2023-2024), Jan Grabowski (2022-2023), Sara R. Horowitz (2020-2021), Peter Hayes (2019-2020), Marion Kaplan (2018-2019), Christopher R. Browning (2017-2018), Omer Bartov (2016-2017), and inaugural Shapiro Scholar David Cesarani (2015-2016).