Victoria Van Orden Martínez holds her Ph.D. in History from Linköping University in Sweden, where she works as a researcher in the Department of Culture and Society (TemaQ). She defended her Ph.D. dissertation, Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945-1946, in January 2024. Her research focuses primarily on the lives, experiences, actions, and agency of survivors of Nazi persecution living as displaced persons in the early postwar period, with a focus on the role of gender and other differences.

BIO

Professor Peter Hayes is a world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Educated at Bowdoin College, the University of Oxford (Balliol College), and Yale University, Peter Hayes is Professor Emeritus of History and German and Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University.

Allison Somogyi earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019. Her dissertation analyzed the survival and resistance tactics employed by young Jewish women in Budapest under Arrow Cross rule and Nazi occupation and traced, through their diaries, how they navigated the fraught space available to them in the chaotic months of Nazi occupation and during the siege of Budapest. She is the winner of several awards and fellowships.

Ioanida Costache is a PhD Candidate in Music at Stanford University. She earned her BA in Music (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Her thesis on Gustav Mahler’s musical ontology in Das Lied von der Erde won the Mishkin Prize for best senior thesis on a musical topic. Her work has recently been published in Critical Romani Studies, and she is the recipient of a number of fellowships and grants, including ASEEES Dissertation Research Grant and Fullbright U.S.

Maël LeNoc is a PhD Candidate in Geography at Texas State University. He holds undergraduate degrees in History and Geography from Rennes 2 University in France, and a Master’s degree in Geography from Texas State University, for which he received Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award in Digital Scholarship from the Conference of Southern Graduate School. LeNoc co-authored three scholarly publications, presented at a number of conferences, and received many fellowships.

Denisa Nešťáková is a historian focusing on 20th-century East Central Europe, the Holocaust and gender studies. She is a research associate at the Herder Institute, and currently concluding her post-doctoral project Privileged to be in Hell. Jewish Women in the Sereď Camp which has been carried thank to the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies. Her examination of the history of family planning resulted in her 2023 book Be Fruitful and Multiply. Slovakia’s Family Planning under three regimes (1918-1965).

Professor Bennett is a literary historian, an associate professor of French, and director of the USC Francophone Research and Resource Center.  

Erin Mizrahi is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. Her research focused on silence in testimonies, to support her multidisciplinary doctoral project on forms of memorialization, witnessing, protest and art through silence.