{"id":10061,"date":"2017-06-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cagr\/?p=10061"},"modified":"2025-02-11T15:18:36","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T23:18:36","slug":"center-for-advanced-genocide-research-awards-2017-usc-graduate-student-research-fellowship-to-maria-zalewska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cagr\/2017\/06\/30\/center-for-advanced-genocide-research-awards-2017-usc-graduate-student-research-fellowship-to-maria-zalewska\/","title":{"rendered":"Center for Advanced Genocide Research Awards 2017 USC Graduate Student Research Fellowship to Maria Zalewska"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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Center for Advanced Genocide Research Awards 2017 USC Graduate Student Research Fellowship to Maria Zalewska<\/h2>\n

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As the 2017 Graduate Summer Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Zalewska has focused her energy on a new research project: \u201cDigital Topography of Memory: Reimagining Landscapes of pre-Holocaust Poland.\u201d The project engages with the Institute\u2019s Visual History Archive by comparing the memories of the pre-World War II spaces in which Poles and Jews interacted in testimony with their cinematically narrativized counterparts.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy juxtaposing the archival testimonies with post-World War II documentary films, I begin to theorize different levels of spatial imaginings and collective encounters with the memory of pre-Holocaust Poland,\u201d Zalewska said. \u201cI investigate the way the pre-Holocaust landscapes were first imagined, experienced and co-produced by their Jewish inhabitants and then reimagined by the Polish inhabitants. I ask, how is the artistically rendered memory of pre-Holocaust space different from the one we know from survivors\u2019 testimonies?\u201d<\/p>\n

To narrow her research, Zalewska specifically looks at the eighteen villages and towns scattered throughout the Polish countryside that are portrayed in the documentary film Po-Lin (2008), by Jolanta Dylewska. In this film, Dylewska recorded interview with the last of the witnesses of pre-Holocaust Poland and presented an image of peaceful cohabitation of two existing cultures.<\/p>\n

\u201cCentral to my research is a consideration of the relationship between witness and survivors\u2019 testimonies to culturally and industrially charged cinematic historical narratives that are indicative of a public discourse at large,\u201d Zalewska said. \u201cI ask, how has contemporary Poland cinematically negotiated its own geography and history of indifference, apathy and \u2013 often \u2013 anger directed at their Jewish neighbors? Are the two memories of the pre-Holocaust space in stark contrast to one another?\u201d<\/p>\n

USC Shoah Foundation\u2019s Visual History Archive \u2013 a collection of 54,000 digitized and fully searchable video testimonies from survivors and other eyewitness of the Holocaust, the Rwandan, Guatemalan and Armenian genocides and the Nanjing Massacre in China \u2013 has helped Zalewska reimagine the landscapes of pre-Holocaust Europe, which she has studied for some time.<\/p>\n

After receiving her M.Phil. in Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Oxford, Zalewska moved to Poland and became the director of the Warsaw office of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, a non-government organization supported by the Polish government that raises funds to preserve the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum.<\/p>\n

Since then, she\u2019s worked with the Foundation as a volunteer and in her matriculation to USC, has combined her academic interests with her professional experience working to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Her Ph.D. dissertation project \u201c#Holocaust: Rethinking the Relationship Between Spaces of Memory and Places of Commemoration in the Digital Age,\u201d examines how new technologies are used and applied to various commemoration projects, how they impact attitudes toward the past and how they re-shape the memory of the Holocaust at a time when the last witnesses are becoming history themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy engaging with transnational modes and media of memorialization as well as digital spaces,\u201d Zalewska said, \u201cI pose a question: does physical space still matter in the digital age?\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the case studies her dissertation engages with is the Institute\u2019s Visual History Archive, which she has followed closely since she became seriously interested in Holocaust studies in 2009.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe vastness of this repository of memory has left a big impression on me,\u201d Zalewska said. \u201cThese testimonies save from oblivion the memory of those who survived the Shoah. They remind us of the most positive aspects of human spirit and resilience, while also bearing witness to the horrors and worst examples of man\u2019s inhumanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

With help from USC Shoah Foundation\u2019s staff, Zalewska has found plenty with which to complete her research project.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could not praise the staff of USC Shoah Foundation enough,\u201d Zalewska said. \u201cThis fellowship allowed me to meet and engage with a group of some of the most inspiring and inspired specialists in the field of memory and genocide research I have ever met. I am thankful for fascinating educational conversations with the director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Dr. Wolf Gruner, and I remain grateful and impressed by the professionalism, courtesy and assistance I\u2019ve received from Martha Stroud, research program officer, and Crispin Brooks, curator of the Visual History Archive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The busy researcher\u2019s next endeavor is a new project entitled \u201cPokemon in Auschwitz: New Encounters Beyond Augmented Reality Technologies, Spaces of Memory and Places of Commemoration.\u201d It will analyze the summer 2016 phenomenon of Pokemon Go and the controversy of catching Pokemon in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She will be presenting this research at the Center’s upcoming international conference “Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies.”<\/p>\n

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