Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center’s 2020 Lev Student Research Fellows Bear Witness
April 14, 2021 at 3:00 PM Pacific Time
An online event with Lucy Sun (USC undergraduate student, History major) and Rachel Zaretsky (MFA candidate in Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design)
2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellows
Organized by USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research
In this event, the Center’s two student research fellows will discuss the testimony-based research they conducted during Summer 2020. Exploring testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive’s Nanjing Massacre collection, Lucy Sun (USC undergraduate student, History major, Psychology and Law minor) researched the resistance of women during the Nanjing Massacre. Rachel Zaretsky (USC graduate student in Art at USC Roski School of Art and Design) explored the testimonies in the Holocaust collection of the archive in order to inspire the creation of artistic response to the archive. Join us to learn more about their research and their experience working with testimonies.
Lucy Sun is a senior at USC, majoring in History and minoring in Psychology and Law. Sharing the 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, she conducted a month of research with survivor testimonies from the Nanjing Massacre collection in the Visual History Archive to contribute to her history honors thesis entitled “Escapes and Deceptions: Chinese Women’s Resistance During the Nanjing Massacre.” Her thesis expands on her previous research on women’s resistance to sexual violence during the Nanjing Massacre, a topic largely unacknowledged in the scholarly literature. The 101 testimonies by Nanjing Massacre survivors in the VHA are essential to her project. Ms. Sun is fluent in Mandarin, and in her proposal, she expressed her commitment to amplifying the voices of women survivors and her motivation to learn more about her hometown’s infamous atrocity. In her project, Ms. Sun explored important and neglected topics (resistance, women’s resistance, sexual violence) and was the Center’s first research fellow to focus exclusively on the Nanjing Massacre collection. She is an engaged young scholar, with past research experience at the USC Culture, Diversity, and Psychophysiology Lab and employment at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
Rachel Zaretsky is completing the second year of her MFA in Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She planned to begin investigating VHA testimonies related to her family’s hometown — Ostrów Mazowiecka, Poland — where much of her family originated and perished during the Holocaust. She used her research with the Visual History Archive to inspire an artistic response to the archive. Ms. Zaretsky earned her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, and her art practice takes the form of performance, video installation and photography. She has created past artistic responses to the Miami Beach Holocaust memorial and to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin. In her innovative proposal, she outlined several stages of her process that will culminate in her creating a work of art responding to the testimonies. The Center is excited about welcoming her to the Center as an intriguing illustration that research not only results in papers, theses, or books, but can result in artistic expressions as well.