USC Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center’s Summer 2016 Research Fellows
April 4, 2017 at 3:30 PM Pacific Time
A public event featuring presentations by the Center’s Summer 2016 research fellows:
– Nisha Kale (USC undergraduate student double majoring in Neuroscience and Law, History, and Culture)
– Erin Mizrahi (PhD candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC)
– Piotr Florczyk (PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing, USC)
– Beatrice Mousli (Professor (teaching), Department of French & Italian, USC)
Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research offers fellowships to support USC undergraduate students, graduate students, and USC faculty in conducting summer research using testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other unique USC collections and resources. This event features four of the Center’s five Summer 2016 research fellows from a variety of disciplines who will share their research and reflect on the use and value of testimonies in their projects.
Nisha Kale, USC undergraduate student double majoring in Neuroscience and Law, History, and Culture
The DEFY Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship allowed Kale to apply her interests in both neuroscience and history to the field of genocide studies. She did so by examining survivors’ reactions to stress – not after the genocide, as most similar research focuses on – but while the genocide was actually occurring, focusing on interviewees’ descriptions of stressful events such as killings, beatings, forced marches and mass executions.
Erin Mizrahi, PhD candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, USC
At USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Mizrahi used the Visual History Archive not so much to learn what survivors had to say but rather to discover the meaning in their silences. She explored moments in testimonies where words fail survivors and in so doing, she identified and analyzed different types of silences in testimonies.
Piotr Florczyk, PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing, USC
As a poet, literary translator and university instructor, Florczyk has long focused his work on history, World War II and the Holocaust. At USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Florczyk watched Visual History Archive testimonies by Polish Jews who talked about places in and around Krakow that Florczyk himself knows from personal experience. He then wrote poetry inspired by the testimonies of the Polish Holocaust survivors he watched.
Beatrice Mousli, Professor (teaching), Department of French & Italian, USC
At USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Professor Bennett explored testimonies from the Visual History Archive discussing the act of writing under threat — those who continued to write even while they faced occupation, deportations and oppression in the throes of World War II.
Due to technical difficulties, the video of the first presentation (delivered by Nisha Kale) is incomplete. Read a summary here.