The Center will support faculty and students in their efforts to engage in meaningful research concerning the Holocaust, genocide and related human rights issues. Helping faculty to conduct significant research in these areas will sustain education in the classroom and beyond. By providing research opportunities to students the Center hopes to encourage the next generation of educators and researchers on this topic.

Research Resources

Holocaust and Genocide Reference Guide, O’Toole Library

USC Shoah Foundation

Fortunoff Archive at Yale

Yad Vashem Digital Collections

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive

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Faculty Research

See Dr. David Gerlach’s article “Toward a Material Culture of Jewish Loss,” in Jewish Culture and History, 18 (2017): 17-33.

Abstract:
What can physical objects tell us about the Holocaust and the experience of survivors? Studies of Jewish restitution mostly focus on the political debates and negotiations for postwar compensation, as well as institutions and actors involved in these discussions. While individual claimants might be used as examples of particular trends in studies of restitution, we lack a matrix to chart the meaning of individual claims in relation to the overall scope of Jewish reparations. This paper explores the nature of individual property claims in an effort to sketch out a material culture of Jewish loss. Although material culture studies tend to explore how goods reflect everyday life and culture, this paper uses this approach to study the personal, political and socio-economic meanings of wartime theft and postwar restitution.

Dr. David Gerlach publishes new book on ethnic cleansing after World War II.

The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of the German-Czech Borderlands after World War II

Listen to Dr. Gerlach discuss the book on the New Books Network podcast

Reviews:
Cathie Carmichael. Review of Gerlach, David W., The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of the German-Czech Borderlands after World War II. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. May, 2019.

Karl F. Baum,”Expellees and Settlers in Northern Bohemia from the End of WWII to the 1950s,” Austrian Studies News Magazine 30, n. 2 (Fall, 2018), 16.