Jadwiga Biskupska is associate professor of military history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX and co-director of the Second World War Research Group, North America (SWWRGNA). She received her PhD in history from Yale University. She studies violence, warfare, and nationalism in twentieth-century central Europe.

Pavlo Khudish is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies, Faculty of History and International Relations, Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine. In 2016, Pavlo defended his dissertation at Uzhhorod University on Czechoslovak-Soviet relations in postwar Transcarpathia. He specializes in Holocaust studies, the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, and Jewish history in the Carpathian region.

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).

Johanna Lehr holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, a professional master's degree in adult psychopathology from the University of Paris 7 and a law degree from the University of Strasbourg. Dr. Lehr has received post-doctoral fellowships from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the Fondation du Judaïsme Français in Paris. She has also worked for Yahad-In Unum, a French organization that raises awareness of the sites of mass executions of Jews and Roma by Nazi extermination units in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

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.

William Ross Jones is a final-year PhD student at the University of Oxford under Professor Zoë Waxman. Their thesis surveys the varied forms of sexual(ized) violence experienced by men and boys, paying close attention to the structures of power enabling such abuse and the complex nature of consent and agency in these experiences. William is currently a Non-Residential Scholar with the USC Shoah Foundation and was recently awarded the Taube Prize in Student Writing from the Oxford Centre of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford for their work.

As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, we pay tribute to some of the people who helped build the organization.

Ita Gordon has worked as an indexer, translator, mentor, and researcher at the USC Shoah Foundation since its founding 30 years ago, channeling her passion for the organization’s mission into diligent care and helping to establish the USC Shoah Foundation as a world leader in collecting, preserving, and sharing survivor testimony.

The USC Shoah Foundation has named two key members to its senior leadership team, Senior Director of Programs Catherine E. Clark and Director of Administration Jenna Leventhal. The appointments represent a pivotal restructuring under the leadership of Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Robert J. Williams as the organization marks its 30th anniversary amid a global rise in antisemitism.