Clara Dijkstra
2023-2024 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies
Clara Dijkstra is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College. Dijkstra earned her BA in History with Honors at the University of Oxford, St Hugh’s College, and earned her Master of Studies in Modern European History at the same university, where she was awarded a Distinction.
Alongside her PhD, she works as a Research Assistant at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, where she organized a groundbreaking international symposium on new research about the Roma genocide and was co-organizer of a research workshop for early-career Holocaust scholars on the benefits, challenges, and issues that arise when working with letters as a source. She has extensive work experience as a writer, having served as a staff writer or reporter for Cherwell (the Oxford University student newspaper), Phaser (the Oxford University student magazine), Frontrunner Magazine, South West Londoner, City A.M. (London’s most-read financial and business newspaper), Hedgeweek, and Private Equity Wire.
She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in September 2023 to conduct research on the experiences of Jews and Roma (Tsiganes) in detention and internment camps in France during the Second World War. At the Center, Dijkstra will examine what testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) reveal about the emotional experiences of internment in the camps of Drancy and Poitiers. Interviewees discuss these camps in over 550 testimonies. Dijkstra plans to explore how different camp settings and conditions influenced the priorities, anxieties, and fears of internees; how the space of the camps affected their emotions; and how gender and notions of family affected their experiences of internment. She is also interested in analyzing how internees communicated about their emotional experiences at the time (in letters) and how that compares to how they remembered and reflected on their experiences afterward (in memoirs and testimonies).
