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.