USC Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center’s Summer 2017 Research Fellows

February 8, 2018 at 4:00 PM Pacific Time

A public event featuring the Center’s Summer 2017 research fellows:
Noha Ayoub (USC undergraduate student majoring in Law, History and Culture and minoring in Middle East Studies)
Maria Zalewska (PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies and Mellon PhD Fellow in the Digital Humanities, USC School of Cinematic Arts)

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 two of the Center’s three Summer 2017 research fellows from a variety of disciplines who will share their research and reflect on the use and value of testimonies in their projects.

As a Graduate Summer Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Maria Zalewska focused her energy on a research project: “Digital Topography of Memory: Reimagining Landscapes of pre-Holocaust Poland.” The project engages with the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive by comparing the testimonies of memories of the pre-World War II spaces in which Poles and Jews interacted with their cinematically narrativized counterparts.

As a DEFY Undergraduate Summer Research Fellow at the Center, Noha Ayoub studied nationalism in Rwanda and the ways in which fictionalized narratives against Tutsis perpetrated by the state led to genocide over 20 years ago. During her monthlong fellowship, Ayoub watched dozens of testimonies and supplemented her viewing with texts about nationalism in order to contextualize the stories the survivors tell in their testimonies.