Christine Liu Awarded 2025-2026 Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has awarded the 2025–2026 Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies to Christine Liu, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Maine.

In her dissertation, currently entitled “’No place to go, no place to sleep, no place to eat’: Reimagining Hunger in Holocaust Ghettos in German-Occupied Poland through Digital-Spatial Analysis,” Liu argues that starvation reshaped social ties, communal relations, and self-perceptions in the ghettos, dominating the physiological and psychological state of incarcerated Jews. Through her transdisciplinary framework, digital humanities tools, maps, and close reading of archival materials and survivor testimonies, Liu applies geographic concepts of space and place to demonstrate that experiences of Jews in Holocaust ghettos were fundamentally defined by hunger.

At the Center, she will explore Holocaust survivor testimonies in the Visual History Archive and volumes in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection at USC Libraries to see how survivors discuss starvation and its effects, the actions they took to alleviate hunger, and the spaces and places that emerge in their accounts of these topics.

Liu earned her BA in History and the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned an MA in Computational Media from Duke University, where her thesis focused on mapping and visualizing testimonies of spaces of confinement in the Kraków ghetto.

Liu has extensive research experience, having worked as a research assistant on the “Holocaust Ghettos Project” and the “Placing the Holocaust” project in the Digital and Spatial History Lab at the University of Maine, supporting Center Affiliated Scholar Professor Anne K. Knowles. She also served as the Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has presented at numerous conferences, symposia, and workshops in the U.S., Italy, France, Czech Republic, and Poland. Her teaching experience includes teaching Digital Humanities in the Holocaust Studies MA program at the University of Haifa for two summers.

The Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the Visual History Archive and related 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 or her research. The fellowship is named after long-time volunteer and former USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors Chair Robert J. Katz in recognition of his service to the USC Shoah Foundation. Read about previous Katz Research Fellows in Genocide Studies here.