Narrating Constraint: Mapping Jewish Women's Mobility and Memory in Paris under the Vichy Regime and Nazi Occupation

Narrating Constraint:

Mapping Jewish Women’s Mobility and Memory in Paris under the Vichy Regime and Nazi Occupation

Map

October 28, 2026 at 12:00 PM Pacific Time
Taper Hall (THH) Room 309K
Join us in person or on Zoom

A public lecture by Kyra Schulman (PhD candidate in History, University of Chicago)
2026-2027 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

In April 1943, Fanny Guenik recorded her daily routes through Paris in her planner: four visits to the Bois de Vincennes, one to the Bois de Boulogne, and outings to the circus, Luna Park, and Édouard Pailleron pool. A month earlier, Tilly Lilienstein visited the same pool with friends before strolling through the Buttes-Chaumont Park. That winter, Rela Landau recalled making daily trips to the Buttes-Chaumont to collect scraps of food left by schoolchildren before sleeping in a mausoleum at Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Read on their own, these fragments seem unremarkable: a cross-section of women’s everyday urban lives. Under Vichy-era antisemitic legislation, which barred Jews from public space, however, such movements could mean arrest, deportation, and death, if discovered. In spite of this, Jewish women’s oral histories, diaries, memoirs, poetry, and drawings repeatedly return to the routes they took under a regime that sought to constrain their movement.

Why did they do so? How did they negotiate the risks of moving through spaces from which they had been legally excluded? And what can we see when accounts of those movements, produced across different genres and at different moments, are read together? In this talk, Kyra Schulman brings these disparate testimonies into conversation by translating their accounts of Parisian space into a new, shared form: the map. Mapping makes it possible to read these accounts alongside one another, tracing patterns and divergences across the corpus — to see where women shared routes and places, where their experiences departed from one another, and where unexpected proximities emerge. It also provides a means of moving between the map and the testimony, allowing spatial patterns to generate new questions from the narratives themselves. The talk concludes by considering how such methods might be used to bring disparate testimonies into conversation in other histories of legally constrained movement, space, and belonging.

Register Here

Lunch will be served.

Kyra Schulman smiles at camera.

Kyra Schulman is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on modern French and Francophone history with particular attention to conflict, memory, and the social and spatial dynamics of everyday urban life. She was a Fulbright Scholar in France (2023-24) and a Doctoral Fellow at the Pozen Center for Human Rights (2024-25). She holds an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar.

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