Julie Fitzpatrick
2023-2024 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow
Julie Fitzpatrick is a PhD candidate in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Fitzpatrick earned her BA in History at the University of Bristol and earned her MA in History with Distinction at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her master’s thesis was entitled “‘Eating? No. They Slurp, Gurgle, Drink, Tilt the Bowls to Swallow the Last Drop’: A Study on Hunger and the Foodways of the Holocaust.”
She will be in residence at the Center for a month from mid-October to mid-November 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, which is currently entitled “‘Light the Candles and Lay the Table’: A Study on German-Jewish Women’s Relationship with Food During the Prewar, Wartime and Postwar Eras.”
In her dissertation research, Fitzpatrick is investigating how German Jews ate – and what they ate – before, during, and after the Holocaust and how German Jewish women interacted with food, cooking, and domestic work, including during periods of intense food insecurity, persecution, and mass migration. In her project, Fitzpatrick uses food as the entryway to discover more about the German Jewish experience of the twentieth century, not only in Germany but along the journeys and in the places where German Jews emigrated, making it a transnational study.
Fitzpatrick’s research is based on a broad array of sources, including memoirs, diaries, recipe books, personal belongings, photographs, and oral history testimonies. At the Center, she’ll be analyzing Holocaust survivor testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and exploring archival materials in the USC Libraries Special Collections, such as etiquette manuals, cookbooks, propaganda, and private papers.
