Raíssa Alonso is the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She is a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. She was in residence at the Center in March 2023 conducting research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).” During her time at the Center, Alonso drew on research resources from the USC Libraries’ Special Collections and Feuchtwanger Memorial Library and Holocaust survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to contribute to her research on the anti-Nazi movement in São Paulo, Brazil, and the connections and communications between resistance leaders in Latin America and exiled German intellectuals in Los Angeles, including Heinrich Mann.

Alonso earned her BA in History and her MA in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has deep experience working with survivor testimonies and related resources not only from her MA research, which drew on police archives from the 1930s and other unique, as-yet-unpublished sources, but also from her experience serving first as a volunteer and then as Associate Researcher on a project to record and preserve testimonies and related documentation from Holocaust survivors who took refuge in Brazil. The project, organized by the Laboratory of Studies in Ethnicity, Racism and Discrimination (LEER) at the University of São Paulo, resulted in the online database ArqShoah, the Virtual Archive of Holocaust and Antisemitism. For the project and the lab, Alonso has assisted in the recording and transcription of testimonies and identifying related sources and documents.

Read more about Raíssa Alonso here. 

Watch her public lecture about her research here.