Tracy Sockalosky teaches 7th Grade Social Studies at Wilson Middle School in Natick, Mass. In January 2015, Sockalosky was one of the 25 educators who participated in the Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program in Poland.

Emily Kocontes is a junior at USC studying Popular Music Performance with a minor in Music Industry. Emily has been interning with USC Shoah Foundation for the communications department since September of 2015.

 

Elissa Frankle is the Digital Projects Coordinator for Museum Experience and Digital Media at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Guest blogger Stacey Perlman is a Communications Writer at Facing History and Ourselves.

Russell A. Spinney is an independent historian and instructor at the Thacher School in Ojai, California.

Peter Hayes is Professor Emeritus of History and German and Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and a former chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his thirteen books are The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (co-edited with John K. Roth), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and Why? Explaining the Holocaust, which also has appeared in German and Spanish translations and shortly will be in Chinese, Polish, and Slovak, as well.

Julie Gruenbaum Fax is a content strategist and writer for the USC Shoah Foundation. She was a senior writer and editor at the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and has co-authored six personal history books. She is currently writing a book about her grandmother’s Holocaust experience.
Martha Stroud manages the day-to-day operations of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, which advances innovative interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides and promotes use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching.

Badema Pitic joined the Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2017, where she is involved in the Center's outreach and academic programming directed at fostering and supporting the scholarly use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. Badema earned her doctorate in Ethnomusicology from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, memory, and politics in the aftermath of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.