Raíssa Alonso Awarded 2022-2023 Greenberg Research Fellowship

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

During her time at the Center, Alonso will draw on research resources from the USC Libraries’ Feuchtwanger Memorial Library and Holocaust survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to contribute to her dissertation research on the anti-Nazi movement in São Paulo, Brazil, and the connections and communications between resistance leaders in Latin America and exiled German intellectuals in Los Angeles, including Heinrich Mann.

Alonso earned her BA in History and her MA in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has deep experience working with survivor testimonies and related resources not only from her MA research, which drew on police archives from the 1930s and other unique, as-yet-unpublished sources, but also from her experience serving first as a volunteer and then as Associate Researcher on a project to record and preserve testimonies and related documentation from Holocaust survivors who took refuge in Brazil. The project, organized by the Laboratory of Studies in Ethnicity, Racism and Discrimination (LEER) at the University of São Paulo, resulted in the online database ArqShoah, the Virtual Archive of Holocaust and Antisemitism. For the project and the lab, Alonso has assisted in the recording and transcription of testimonies and identifying related sources and documents.

Alonso is an editor at Editora FTD, one of the leading textbook publishing houses in Brazil, where she served as editor-in-chief for a history textbook for children ages seven to ten and serves as a consultant and reviewer for several history collections. Currently, she works in the Digital Education department designing educational material for distance learning. She has presented her research on anti-Nazi resistance at a number of conferences and seminars across Brazil.

The first endowed fellowship established at the Center in 2014, the Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline and anywhere in the world for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other unique USC research resources. The fellowship enables the recipient to spend one month in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research during the academic year and to deliver a public lecture about his/her/their research.