Alexandra Szabó

2023-2024 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow

Alexandra Szabó is a PhD candidate in History at Brandeis University. Szabó earned her BA in American Studies and Pedagogy at the PPKE University in Budapest. She holds two MA degrees – one in Literary and Cultural Studies from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and the other in History from Central European University. 

She will be residence for a month during the Spring 2024 semester to conduct research for her dissertation, in which she investigates Hungarian Romani and Jewish women’s experiences of fertility abuses (failed pregnancies, miscarriages, sterilizations, postwar infertility) in the shadow of Nazi persecution. During her time at the Center, Szabó will draw on the Holocaust survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives (VHA), as well as materials in the Holocaust and Genocide Collection at USC Libraries. In her project, Szabó examines these women’s experiences not only during the war but in the years since, analyzing the short and long-term impacts of these abuses and exploring how survivors discuss these experiences – or not – after the war, including in the form of survivor testimony. 

Szabó has published research articles, book reviews, and book chapters on topics related to this research, as well as on research about memories of Jewish Budapest before and after the Holocaust. Her work has appeared in Cultural History, The Hungarian Holocaust Review, European Journal of Women’s Studies, among other venues. She has earned numerous fellowships and awards for her research from institutions such as the International Society for Cultural Studies, the Hungarian American Coalition, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), and the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She has also served as an interviewer for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Last Chance Testimony initiative.