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.

USC Shoah Foundation’s liaison in Poland, Monika Koszyńska coordinates the Visual History Archive access sites in Poland; represents the Institute at conferences and seminars; organizes the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century training program for Polish educators; and coordinates fundraising and other outreach efforts. She is also on the staff of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews’ education department, a Visual History Archive Access Site.

Keith Stringfellow teaches American History, World History, and English at Charlotte Islamic Academy in Charlotte, North Carolina. Stringfellow has been teaching for nine years and was named Business and Finance High School's Teacher of the Year in 2010.

Douglas Greenberg is Senior Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation and Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. Previously he was the Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation, a Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Dean at Princeton University and President of the Chicago Historical Society.

Sarah Griffitts is a social studies high school teacher at the Calgary Board of Education in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  She received a BA in History at Mount Royal College and an MA in History from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.  Her master’s thesis focused on the establishment of Chelmno and Sobibor through the path of the Einsatzgruppen. 

Svetlana Ushakova currently works in the collections department at USC Shoah Foundation as a content specialist. She received her doctoral degree in Russian history at the Novosibirsk State University, Russia. She is the author and co-author of several publications on the history of Soviet ideological campaigns, social mobilization, and adaptation methods used by peasant families to survive Soviet deportation and exile.

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.

Jenna Leventhal is the associate director of education - digital engagement and oversees IWitness. She received her master’s in public history from the University of Houston and in 2011 joined the staff of the USC Shoah Foundation to work on IWitness, while the educational website was still undergoing testing and development. Leventhal was first introduced to the USC Shoah Foundation as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, working on a project for a public history course.  

Robson Bello visited the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in March 2023 as a Visiting Scholar. He earned his Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD degrees in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His dissertation is entitled "The Playground of the Past: Videogames and the Reification of Memory, Play, and the American West" ("O Playground do Passado: Videogame e a reificação da Memória, do Lúdico e do Oeste Americano").

Lucy Sun will be a senior in the Fall 2020 semester. She is majoring in History and minoring in Psychology and Law.

Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities and an affiliated scholar of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Her research interests include cinematic representations of the Holocaust; documentary film; national and transnational modes and media of memorialization; digital humanities; politics of technologized memory; place and space in cinema; history as film/film as history; and political economy of film.

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.

USC Professor of History Wolf Gruner directs USC Dornsife Center for Advance Genocide Research and sets its research agenda. Gruner also holds the Shapell- Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at the university. An internationally recognized expert on genocide, Gruner has published 10 books and numerous articles on the Holocaust in Europe as well as on mass violence against indigenous people in Latin America.        

Mehmet Polatel is the 2019-2020 Junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul with his dissertation focusing on the emergence and transformation of the Armenian land question in the late Ottoman Empire. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he earned a BA in International Relations from the University of Middle East Technical University in 2007, and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Istanbul in 2009.

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.

Lauren Deutsch is a sophomore at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studying the History of Art. She was a 2018 summer intern at USC Shoah Foundation and has a personal connection to the Holocaust. 

Daryn Eller manages the Institute’s institutional media collection and participates in cataloging the Visual History Archive testimonies. She previously worked as a magazine and book writer, has an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, and a masters in library and information science from San Jose State University.

Amy B. Bloom, JD is a social studies/history educational consultant for Oakland Schools, a regional education service agency supporting 28 school districts in Oakland County, Michigan. She also serves as the Chair of the Executive Board for the Center for the Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University.

Benjamin Biniaz is a sophomore at Yale University. During his 2016 summer break he is interning with USC Shoah Foundation’s communication department. His family has been involved with the Institute for many years since his grandmother Celina Biniaz and great- grandmother Phyllis Karp gave their testimonies to the Visual History Archive in 1996.  

USC Shoah Foundation archivist Sandra Aguilar interprets and formats information and details about the interviewees and the interviews to be brought into the database systems of the Visual History Archive. She is also a liaison between USC Shoah Foundation’s research specialists and database programmers to develop ways for the testimonies to be searched and experienced.

Chad Gibbs is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests extend from Holocaust studies to modern European Jewish history, modern Germany, memory, oral history, gender, and antisemitism. Chad’s dissertation, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” investigates the spatial and social networks of Jewish resistance inside this extermination camp.

Barnabas Balint is a PhD candidate in History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK and the 2021-2022 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Read more about him here. 

Roza Petrosyan graduated with honors from USC with Bachelor Degrees in history and social psychology, as well as a minor in Russian area studies. She interned at the USC Shoah Foundation for three years and continues to work at the Institute as a researcher. In the fall, Roza will attend USC Gould School of Law with the hopes of becoming a human rights advocate.

Tim Cole (Bristol University), Alberto Giordano (Texas State University), Paul Jaskot (DePaul University), and Anne Knowles (University of Maine) are members of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, a multi-institutional, collaborative research group that uses mapping and geography to examine spaces and places of the Holocaust. The group came together in 2007 at a workshop hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to discuss how geography, mapping and geo-visualization can shed new light on the history of the Holocaust.

As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, Doris Lazarus has dedicated her career to Holocaust education and remembrance. She has been a Docent at the Illinois Holocaust Museum for six years and is also a speaker on the Museum's Speaker's Bureau. Additionally, Doris was actively involved with the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Museum as well as the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. From 1994-1998 Doris interviewed Holocaust survivors for USC Shoah Foundation and their testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive. 

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.

Alex Biniaz-Harris is a recent USC graduate, with Bachelor degrees in business and music. Alex has worked for USC Shoah Foundation for three years, as a communications and social media marketing intern. His grandmother, Celina Biniaz, and her parents Phyllis and Irwin Karp are survivors of Schindler’s List. Both Celina and Phyllis’s testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive.

Shael Rosenbaum works in real estate development and management and is the President of Fremont Street Holdings. Shael served as the National Chair of the Canadian Young Adult March of the Living and is currently the Chair of the UJA Federation Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto. Shael was also the Master of Ceremonies at the largest rally against antisemitism in Canadian history. Most recently, he graduated from the Joshua Institute. Shael obtained a degree in Biological and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario.

Anna Lenchovska, M.D. in Psychology, is the international consultant in Ukraine for USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. For nearly 10 years she has helped develop educational resources on how to use video testimonies in Ukraine classrooms.  Lenchovska also serves as executive director of the Congress of National Minorities of Ukraine. Prior to this she worked in the Ukrainian NGO “Institute of Jewish Studies” and a clinic for child psychiatry and psychotherapy.