2025 Charles E. Scheidt Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Awarded to Ana Hunter
The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has bestowed the 2025 Charles E. Scheidt Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to Ana Hunter, a rising junior at the University of Southern California, for Summer 2025.
The Charles E. Scheidt Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship supports undergraduate students from any academic institution and any academic discipline to visit the Center for two months to conduct original research advancing Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Fellows make use of the unique research resources at USC, including the Special Collections at USC Libraries, the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection, and the Visual History Archive. Ana Hunter is spending two months at the Center during Summer 2025 and will present her research publicly during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Ana Hunter is a rising junior who is majoring in Game Development and Interactive Design. Her project expands on a research paper she wrote in a course on the Holocaust taught by the Center’s founding director Professor Wolf Gruner. In her research, she explores the emotional and generational consequences of perpetrators going unpunished in the contexts of the Holocaust and the Jim Crow era in the United States. In addition to exploring testimonies in the Visual History Archive, Hunter conducted interviews with her own grandparents – including one who swam in the river where Emmett Till’s body was found – to explore how trauma, survival strategies, and silence shape collective memory. At the Center this summer, Hunter is deepening this research to design and build an interactive computer-based experience that invites users to reflect on survival, silence, and resistance in systems that criminalize identity.
Hunter brings to this work a distinctive blend of narrative design, visual storytelling, and historical inquiry. She has served as Lead Game Artist and Producer on multiple game development teams, won the Gold Award in the 2024 Game Developers Conference Narrative Competition for her analysis of the video game Venba, and is currently developing an interactive experience exploring the cultural displacement and historical lineage of jazz dance. At USC she co-founded and served as Vice President for the Black and Indigenous Game Students (BIGS) student organization. She is a poet and accomplished digital artist. She was named Memphis’ inaugural Youth Poet Laureate in 2023. She is a freelance photographer, and her photographs have appeared in the Daily Trojan student newspaper at USC.
Watch her discuss her research and project below.