Barnabas Balint Awarded 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship

Barnabas Balint, a PhD candidate at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, UK, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center during Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which is entitled “Accelerated Development into Adulthood: The Changing Roles of Young Hungarians During the Holocaust.”

During his time at the Center, Balint will conduct research with the Holocaust testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to investigate how the meaning and experience of “youth” changed for Hungarian Jewish youth on a personal, societal, and structural scale during the Holocaust. He will explore how young Jews’ experiences of age intersected with developing ideas about gender, space, ideology, religion, and identity. He plans to examine what the testimonies reveal about how young Hungarian Jews perceived their age, how they defined “youth” and whether those ideas changed during the Holocaust, how their age shaped their wartime experiences and roles in society, and how age intersected with other elements of their identity. Balint’s multilingual doctoral research (in English, Hungarian, and French) draws on many types of sources, archives, methods, and digital humanities tools. Using testimonies for this research enables Balint to explore the subjective and personal ways young people experienced their age in a way that few other sources allow.

Balint earned his BA with Honors in History at the University of Exeter and his MA in Modern European History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He has presented his work at a number of international conferences and workshops. He has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Holocaust Research on the survival strategies of Hungarian Jewish youth coming of age in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which draws on over 60 testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

In addition to his research, Balint dedicates his time to Holocaust education and commemoration, including acting as a Holocaust Educational Trust Regional Ambassador, serving as a board member for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Youth Program, leading Holocaust Memorial Day Trust workshops, and organizing award-winning Holocaust Memorial Day conferences for schools, among many other efforts.

The Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other unique USC research resources. The fellowship enables the recipient to spend one month in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research during the academic year and to deliver a public lecture about his or her research. The fellowship is made possible through the generosity of Gerald Breslauer, Mickey Rutman, and Tammy Anderson.