2025 Charles E. Scheidt Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Awarded to Hannah Roth

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has bestowed the 2025 Charles E. Scheidt Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to Hannah Roth, a rising junior at Grinnell College, 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. Hannah Roth is spending two months at the Center during Summer 2025 and will present her research publicly during the 2025-2026 academic year.

Hannah Roth is a rising junior who is double-majoring in Anthropology and History with a concentration in Latin American Studies. When she applied for the fellowship, Roth proposed to conduct a comparative analysis of sexual violence, genocidal trauma, and communal disempowerment. During her time at the Center, her focus on narratives about sexual violence evolved into a broader focus on historical memory, knowledge production, and competing narratives in local, national and international discourses. She analyzed these themes in relation to the Guatemalan genocide, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the mass violence against the Rohingya in 2017.

Hannah Roth brings to this project a foundation of experience in ethnographic and archival research, including research against Indigenous people during the Guatemalan genocide. In Spring 2025, she conducted research on sexual violence and gender discrimination through the lens of her experience as a student-athlete, conducting a directed-research archival ethnography on Grinnell’s Women’s Cross Country Team, exploring Title IX’s role in facilitating unique campus and athletic cultures. She competes in Cross Country and Track and Field and has earned Academic All-Conference honors while maintaining a rigorous academic schedule.

Hannah Roth has also works as a staff member for at Grinnell’s Outdoor Recreation Program and has spent multiple summers in youth education and archival positions, including a fellowship at the Evergreen Museum and Library at Johns Hopkins University, where she helped sort and organize the museum’s administrative archives.

Watch her discuss her research below.