Anna Maria Droumpouki Awarded 2025-2026 Center Research Fellowship

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has awarded the 2025–2026 Center Research Fellowship to Dr. Anna Maria Droumpouki, who recently served as Senior Research Associate in the Department of History at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. An accomplished historian of Holocaust memory, post-war identity reconstruction, and the legacies of genocide in Southeastern Europe, Dr. Droumpouki will be in residence at the Center in the Spring 2026 semester.

During her residency, Dr. Droumpouki will draw from archival collections, survivor testimonies – including those housed in the Visual History Archive – and digital humanities methods to investigate the experience of Jews who went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Greece. She will trace the survival networks that emerged during this period, shedding light on the complexities of rescue, betrayal, and survival against the larger backdrop of Greek-Jewish relations. Going beyond the dominant narratives in Greek public memory that emphasize national solidarity and heroism, Dr. Droumpouki will explore the diverse motivations and lived realities of both rescuers and those in hiding.

Dr. Droumpouki earned her BA in History and Archaeology, her MA in Museology, and her PhD in Contemporary Greek and European History from the University of Athens.

She brings to her fellowship over 15 years of experience studying war, memory, and identity, particularly within Jewish communities in Greece during and after World War II. At Ludwig-Maximilian University, she worked on the DFG project “The Worst Times Are Not Yet Over: Jewish Life in Post-War Greece, 1944-1949,” which illuminated the multidimensional challenges faced by Holocaust survivors, particularly their efforts to rebuild communal and individual identities amidst the broader sociopolitical upheaval of post-war Europe. At Free University Berlin, she was the scientific coordinator of the Greek-German project “Memories of the Occupation in Greece.” She served as a Gerda Henkel Fellow for the project “The Shoah and the (re)making of Greek Jewry: The Case of the Jews in Athens” and is the scientific coordinator of the project “Block 15 – A Virtual Journey” in Greece. She is affiliated with the Selma Stern Zentrum Berlin at Humboldt University. She recently served as adjunct lecturer at the University of the Aegean.

Dr. Droumpouki is the author of three monographs, co-editor of five edited volumes, and author of more than two dozen scholarly articles and book chapters. In her book Μνημεία της Λήθης. Ίχνη του Β’ Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου στην Ελλάδα και στην Ευρώπη (Monuments of Oblivion: Traces of World War II in Greece and Europe, Polis, 2014), she examines how Holocaust memory has been constructed and contested across national and local contexts, highlighting the tensions between remembering and forgetting in public commemorations and the role of monuments in shaping collective memory. She co-edited the volume After the Holocaust: New Research on the Holocaust of Greek Jews (Jewish Museum, Thessaloniki 2017), in which she presents novel insights into the Holocaust’s enduring impact on Greece, emphasizing narratives of survival, loss, and contested justice.

She takes her work as a public historian seriously, spearheading efforts to make Holocaust testimonies accessible to broader audiences through digital platforms, serving as an administrator of the Visual History Archive at the University of Athens from 2011 to 2016, and she has worked collaboratively with the Osthofen Concentration Camp Memorial to develop exhibition material, reflecting her dedication to engaging with communities affected by historical trauma and to using history to foster understanding and dialogue.

The Center Research Fellowship enables one senior scholar from any discipline to spend a semester in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to use the Visual History Archive and related unique research resources at USC for innovative projects. Read more about past Center Research Fellows here.