Christopher J. Anderson Awarded 2024-2025 Greenberg Research Fellowship

Christopher J. Anderson, a PhD candidate in Geographic Information Science at Texas State University, has been awarded the 2024-2025 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence during October 2024 as he conducts research for his dissertation “Landscapes of Holocaust Rescue.” His research focuses on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, a region in south central France which was a statistically and culturally significant place of rescue.

During his residency, Anderson will explore testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and test his computational analysis of the testimonies, through which he explores victims’ experiences with genocide by employing an innovative combination of spatial analytics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, remote sensing, and social network analysis. In his research, he plans to examine not only the geography of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon but also the social and emotional facets of rescue in this region.

In 2021 and 2022, Anderson participated in the European Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He has also participated in multiple symposiums organized by the University Consortium in Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). As part of his commitment to public scholarship, he delivered a presentation to the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio Texas on the geography of Holocaust rescue as part of their 2022 Holocaust Remembrance Week. With Center affiliated scholar Alberto Giordano, Anderson recently coauthored an article entitled “A Spatial Model for the Representation of Emotional Landscapes” which is being published in Transactions in GIS.

Anderson earned a BSc in Management from Binghamton University in Binghamton New York. He also holds a Master of Divinity from Clarks Summit University and a Certificate in Geographic Information Systems from University of Southern California. Before his doctoral studies, he served as a Chaplain in the US Army from 2004 to 2018 and as the pastor for two churches in Marathon, New York. In addition to working towards a doctoral degree, Anderson owns and operates Nordic GeoSolutions, LLC, a GIS company that serves both public and private clients.

The first endowed fellowship established at the Center in 2014, the Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline and anywhere in the world 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 their research. Read more about past Greenberg Research Fellows here.