Fellowships

Julie DawsonFortunoff Fellow

Julie Dawson is completing her doctoral degree at the University of Vienna’s Institute for Contemporary History. She previously studied at Columbia University, the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and Northwestern University. Her dissertation examines postwar Jewish life in Romania through the lens of recently found diaries of a Transnistrian survivor. Dawson has worked extensively in and with Romanian archival repositories, directing the Leo Baeck Institute’s archival survey of Transylvania and Bukovina (jbat.lbi.org) from 2012-2019. She has held fellowships from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute/Yale University (2020-2021) and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (2022-2024). She is co-editor of Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices: Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins (2023) and has published in, amongst others, European Holocaust Studies Vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust and Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Her research interests include Jewish Bukovina, communist Romania, Habsburg Jewish history, women’s history, trauma and memory studies.

Judith LinFortunoff Fellow

Judith Lin is a writer and researcher of the Sephardic Holocaust experience. She completed her PhD as a Rachel Winer Manon Jewish Studies fellow at the University of Virginia. After many years working with face-to-face with survivors, Judith has developed listening strategies that rely on trust, multilingualism, and co-created memory. Judith’s work combines analysis of oral testimonies with archival papers and collected writings in Ladino. Her first monograph, Belonging to Exile: Sephardic Homelands through Poetry, discusses the different national geographies that appealed to Sephardic Holocaust survivors after the war. Her second book-length project, Membranza: Listening to Sephardic Voices touched by the Holocaust, explores relationship between language and visceral memory in testimonies that have been recorded in Ladino.

Nevena BajalicaFortunoff Fellow

Nevena Bajalica is a researcher, educator, and project manager specializing in Holocaust education, human rights, and combating antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. She is the co-founder and program manager at Terraforming, an organization based in Novi Sad, Serbia dedicated to fostering Holocaust remembrance and improving teaching and learning about the Holocaust through innovative educational initiatives. Since 2011, Nevena has been a member of the national delegation of the Republic of Serbia to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). She previously coordinated projects for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, focusing on Holocaust education in the Western Balkans, and worked on international development initiatives with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her research background includes contributions to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), where she worked as a regional expert and author of the official independent historical report Srebrenica – A ‘Safe’ Area, commissioned by the Dutch government to reconstruct and describe events before, during, and after the fall of the UN enclave Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia.

Lida DodouFortunoff Fellow

Lida Dodou is a historian who specializes on Salonika’s Jews during the 19th and 20th centuries. She has also worked as an educator and editor and she has collaborated with cultural institutions. Her research focuses on eras of transition and the impact on Jewish Salonika. Various fellowships have taken her across Europe, and she has worked and published on a variety of subjects, from early 19th century Salonikan Jewish business networks, to Jewish migration from Salonika to the Habsburg Empire and its successor states and antisemitism as a decision-making factor.

Sarah TimpermanFortunoff Fellow

Sarah Timperman holds a degree in contemporary history. Since 2000, she has been working at the Auschwitz Foundation in Brussels, Belgium where she is responsible for the Fondation’s archives. Timperman served as the Editorial secretary of the International journal on audio-visual testimony (2000-2006), and is responsible for the Foundation’s audiovisual recording program of testimonies since 2010. She is co-author of the collection Paroles d’archives (‘Words of archives’), and documentaries based on interviews collected by the Foundation.

Dorien StyvenFortunoff Fellow

Dorien Styven obtained a master’s degree in History at the KULeuven and an advanced Master in Archival Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Ms. Styven is affiliated with Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Research Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Belgium, since 2010. As of 2019 she manages all aspects of archival curation as well as the Give Them a Face commemoration project. Ms. Styven represents Kazerne Dossin within the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) and the Archive and Contemporary Records board of the Flemish Association for Library, Archive and Documentation (VVBAD), and co-chairs the Working Group on Sustainable Publishing of Metadata within the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). Her research focuses on hiding in Belgium and on the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Holocaust remembrance.

Evlampia TsireliArtist-in-Residence

Dr. Tsireli is an author and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History and Archaeology, School of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). During her fellowship at AUTH, Tsireli will conduct research on the life and testimony of Samuel Profeta. Profeta, known to the Jews of Thessaloniki as “Uncle Sam”, and an important figure in the community,  dedicated his life to working with children after war. Her goal is to produce a graphic novel based on Profeta’s Ladino testimony in the Fortunoff Archive. This will be the first time that a Greek survivor’s testimony is used as the basis for a graphic novel in Greece.

The novel will be published in Ladino and Greek. Tsireli hopes this recounting of Profeta’s lifestory and work can have a profound social and pedagogical impact on present and future generations in Greece. The novel will also center the Ladino language as carrier of Sephardic Jewish culture.

Dr.  Tsireli’s professional accomplishments as an author, her academic background in Theology, Biblical Archaeology, Jewish history, and her knowledge of Ladino, will serve her well in this effort.

Grzegorz KwiatkowskiArtist-in-Residence

Kwiatkowski has earned international recognition for both his poetry and his activism. His literary works, including the acclaimed collection Crops, tackle profound themes of violence, genocide, and human rights. Translated by Peter Constantine, Crops has been published in the United States, and beyond. Kwiatkowski’s poetry is not merely a reflection on the past, but an urgent call to confront the realities of hatred and violence in the present. He conducts readings and speaks regularly at universities around the world.

Kwiatkowski is also an activist who helped uncover nearly half a million pairs of shoes left to decay near the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Kwiatkowski has been fighting for the site to be preserved and recognized officially as a site of memory.

During his residency at the Fortunoff Archive, Kwiatkowski will combine testimony, historical research, and his artistic vision to create a new work that speaks to the enduring importance of remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust. He plans to exhibit this work in both Gdańsk and at Yale University, further bridging the historical connection between Poland and the wider world.

Nora KrugArtist-in-Residence

Krug is a German-American author and illustrator whose drawings and visual narratives have appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies internationally, and in editions of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics and Best Non-Required Reading. She is a recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Maurice Sendak Foundation, and others. Her illustrations have been recognized with gold and silver medals by the Society of Illustrators and the NY Art Directors Club, and her animations were shown at the Sundance Festival. Krug was named Illustrator of the Year 2019 by the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Krug’s visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (Scribner, 2018), about WWII and her own German family history, was chosen as a best book of the year by the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and others. It was the winner of many awards, including the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, and the British Book Design and Production Award. Her collaboration with historian Timothy Snyder, a graphic edition of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Ten Speed Press, 2021), a guide for resisting authoritarianism, was named a Best Graphic Novel of 2021 by the New York Times, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and one of Germany’s Most Beautiful Books of 2022. Diaries of War, her recent book of graphic journalism that chronicles the contrasting experiences of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist, both grappling with the realities of Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, won the Overseas Press Club’s Best Cartoon Award runner-up citation and was named one of Germany’s Most Beautiful Books of 2024.

Krug is Associate Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. She holds a B.A. Honours degree in Performance Design from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, a Diplom in Visual Communications from the University of Arts Berlin, and an M.F.A. in Illustration as a Visual Essay from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

During her tenure at Yale, Krug will be conducting research to produce an illustrated book based on materials at the Fortunoff Archive and witness testimony as part of a SSHRC grant project entitled Narrative Art and Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.

Michala Jandák LončíkováFortunoff Archive Fellow

Michala Jandák Lončíková is is a historian who defended her dissertation on antisemitic propaganda in Slovakia and the Independent State of Croatia. Her main research interest is modern Jewish history in the 20^th century, especially the Holocaust in Slovakia and its aftermath. She participated in several research projects, for instance, “Pogroms in East and East Central Europe: Collective Violence and Popular Culture” (Gerda Henkel Stiftung) and “Genocide, Postwar Migration and Social Mobility: Entangled Experiences of Roma and Jews” (GAČR, EXPRO).

Currently, she works at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague and at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the framework of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (H 2020). Recently, she published a chapter, „ZWISCHEN »RASSE« UND KONFESSION. Die jüdische Bevölkerung in der Slowakei 1938 bis 1945“ in Martin Zückert (ed.), Handbuch der Religions- und Kirchengeschichte der Slowakei im 20. Jahrhundert.

As Fortunoff Fellow, Jandák Lončíková will produce an annotated critical edition of a Slovak testimony for our Critical Edition Series as part of our Claims Conference Grant Unlocking Survivor Testimony: A Program to Produce Critical Annotated Editions of Non-English Holocaust Testimonies.

Matthew JohnsonFortunoff Archive Fellow

Matthew Johnson, is currently the Associate Senior Lecturer in Yiddish at the Centre for Languages and Literature (SOL). His teaching and research interests include Yiddish- and German-language cultural history, literature, and other media, translation theory and practice, and the history and representation of the Holocaust. His writing has or will soon appear in The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, German Studies Review, In geveb, and AJS Perspectives, among other venues, and he serves as a peer review editor at In geveb. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Faltering Language: On German-Yiddish Literature.

As Fortunoff Fellow, Johnson will produce an annotated critical edition of a Yiddish testimony for our Critical Edition Series as part of our Claims Conference Grant Unlocking Survivor Testimony: A Program to Produce Critical Annotated Editions of Non-English Holocaust Testimonies.

Daniela Ozacky SternFortunoff Archive Fellow

Daniela Ozacky Stern is a scholar specializing in Holocaust Studies and Modern Jewish History, with a particular focus on Jewish resistance during World War II and the Holocaust. She is currently a lecturer at Western Galilee College in Israel and has previously served as the director of the Moreshet Holocaust Archive in Givat Haviva, Israel. Dr. Ozacky Stern earned her PhD in Jewish History from the University of Haifa, where her research focused on Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and Belarus. She holds a master’s degree in History from Tel Aviv University, having studied Nazi propaganda efforts led by Joseph Goebbels, a topic which she later published as a book, Goebbels: Nazi Master of Illusion.

Her academic journey is further enriched by postdoctoral research conducted at Yad Vashem, and she has been honored as a USHMM EHRI fellow. Dr. Ozacky Stern’s published works investigate various facets of Holocaust history in Eastern Europe, including studies on the Vilna Ghetto, smaller ghettos in Belarus, and the partisan forests. Her research interests extend to themes such as documentation, diaries, and archival materials. Additionally, she has contributed to scholarship in the field of modern Jewish history, and serves as the Book Review Editor for the journal Jewish Culture and History.

Andrei KureichikFortunoff Archive Fellow, Playwright-in-Residence

Andrei Kureichik is a playwright, director, publicist and civil activist who has written more than 30 movies and TV films. He is the author of more than 30 plays which were performed in many theaters in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other countries. He holds a master’s degree in Political Science and Law from Belarusian State University.

The author’s latest work was the film script for Moving Up, a film about the brilliant victory of the USSR national team in basketball at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. It became the highest-grossing film of Russian cinema in its entire history. His films have grossed over $190 million in theaters in Eastern Europe.

Kureichik has gained an international following as a political playwright. He produced the documentary play “Insulted. Belarus(sia)”, about the 2020 presidential elections, subsequent protests, and violent crackdown by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus. The play has already been translated into 29 languages and received 200 readings and performances across the globe.

Kureichik has become the first Belarusian Yale World Fellow in 2022 at Jackson’s School of Global Affairs at Yale University. He plans to write a play based on testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive during his fellowship.