Call for Applications

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education invites applications from graduate students from any university for the 2024-2025 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies.

The fellowship provides $4,000 support and a yearlong access to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive for conducting research about antisemitism, including its causes, representations, and consequences. In addition, the Institute will support the registration for an academic conference for the selected fellow to share their research with wider scholarly community during the 2024/2025 academic year. The project can focus on either historic or contemporary antisemitism, or both, and should rely on oral history testimonies housed in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive and/or other related resources and collections at the Institute and USC. The fellowship is open to advanced-level PhD Candidates from any university and from all disciplines.

The USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies will be expected to spend one month in residence at the Institute during the 2024/2025 academic year. During their residency, the fellow is 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.

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). Preference will be given to interdisciplinary research projects.

The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive 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 testimonies 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 testimonies in the Visual History Archive, making it one of the world's largest social history sources for the study of antisemitism in the 20^th and 21^st 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 December 15, 2023.

To apply, submit your application here. Required application materials include:

• 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. Please make sure to indicate how your project addresses the topic of antisemitism;
• recommendation letter from a faculty advisor.

Applicants will be notified about award decisions in February 2024.

For any questions about the fellowship, please email us at vhi-web@usc.edu. Please put the name of the fellowship in your subject line.

Important note: The USC Shoah Foundation's Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies is separate from the USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Fellowship in Genocide Studies. Scholars interested in the latter opportunity may look at a separate fellowship competition at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, which is inviting applications from advanced-standing PhD candidates for the 2024-2025 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship; the 2024-2025 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies; and the 2024-2025 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship. Read more about those fellowships here.