Raíssa Alonso Returns to the Center as Visiting Fulbright Scholar

Raíssa Alonso, PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, who was in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in March 2023 as the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow, has returned to the Center for the 2024-2025 academic year. Having been awarded a Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, she will conduct research for her dissertation entitled “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

Building on research she conducted during her previous residency, Alonso will delve deeper into research resources from the USC Libraries’ Feuchtwanger Memorial Library and Holocaust survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to contribute to her dissertation research on the anti-Nazi movement in São Paulo, Brazil, and the connections and communications between resistance leaders in Latin America and exiled German intellectuals in Los Angeles, including Heinrich Mann. She plans to also visit archives in the New York and Washington, D.C.

Alonso earned her BA in History and her MA in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Since her last visit, she passed her qualifying examinations for her PhD. She has deep experience working with survivor testimonies and related resources not only from her MA research, which drew on police archives from the 1930s and other unique, as-yet-unpublished sources, but also from her experience serving first as a volunteer and then as Associate Researcher on a project to record and preserve testimonies and related documentation from Holocaust survivors who took refuge in Brazil. The project, organized by the Laboratory of Studies in Ethnicity, Racism and Discrimination (LEER) at the University of São Paulo, resulted in the online database ArqShoah, the Virtual Archive of Holocaust and Antisemitism. For the project and the lab, Alonso has assisted in the recording and transcription of testimonies and identifying related sources and documents.

Alonso is an editor at Editora FTD, one of the leading textbook publishing houses in Brazil, where she served as editor-in-chief for a history textbook for children ages seven to ten and serves as a consultant and reviewer for several history collections. Currently, she works in the Digital Education department designing educational material for distance learning. She has presented her research on anti-Nazi resistance at a number of conferences and seminars across Brazil.

Watch her Center lecture about anti-Nazi resistance on the American continent here, read a summary of it here, and read a blog about what inspired her research here.

As part of its Visiting Scholar program, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research welcomes international scholars who have secured their own funding, providing them with workspace, support, access to the rich resources at USC, and involvement in the intellectual life at the Center and at the University of Southern California.