Mirah Langer Awarded 2025-2026 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has awarded the 2025–2026 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship to Mirah Langer, a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Vienna in Austria.

In her dissertation, Langer examines how descendants of Holocaust survivors – specifically children and grandchildren – are positioned within contemporary Holocaust commemoration practices and how they themselves engage with these commemorative spaces and discourses. In her project, she focuses on intergenerational memory transmission and the evolving role of survivor descendants in remembrance cultures across the United States and Germany. Through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and sociological analysis, Langer explores how descendants navigate inherited trauma, shifting cultural narratives, and the expectations placed on them within memorial institutions, commemorative events, and family contexts.

As part of her methodology, Langer watches Holocaust survivor testimonies with the children and grandchildren of the interviewees and asks them to reflect on the interviews. This is how she will spend part of her monthlong residency at the Center in Spring 2025.

Growing up in South Africa, Langer earned her BA at the University of Cape Town and she has multiple Masters degrees – a Master of Science in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. For her first Masters, she wrote a thesis on how parents of children born in South Africa after 1994 view their children’s racial identity. For her second Masters thesis, she wrote about the experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors. She also completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at the University of the Witwatersrand.

She has extensive research and teaching experience and has presented her research widely at convenings of the Memory Studies Association and other conferences and workshops in Austria, United Kingdom, Israel, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil.

She has been awarded multiple fellowships and awards. She was named one of 10 global Jewish leaders as part of the Jewish Future Forum, an initiative by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk organization in Berlin, Germany. She has participated as a fellow in programs at Central European University and Royal Holloway, University of London. She earned the Conny Kristel Research Fellowship from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) that funded her research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum last summer,

In the public sphere, Langer was a writer for the South African Jewish Report newspaper in Johannesburg for four years. In South Africa, she also designed and taught a Holocaust Studies curriculum for the South African Board of Jewish Education where she served as an educator for more than a decade. She also volunteered for an NGO providing educational and holistic mentoring for underprivileged youth in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

The Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation 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 made possible through the generosity of Gerald Breslauer, Mickey Rutman, and Tammy Anderson. Learn more about past Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellows here.