Kolja Buchmeier is a PhD candidate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Leipzig and an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Research on Antisemitsm from the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Prior to his doctoral studies he worked at the Sachsenhausen Memorial and the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (ZfG) and the online platform “Die andere Seite der Verfolgung. Selbstzeugnisse des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts revisited”. 

In his PhD project titled “Das Netzwerk der nationalsozialistischen Zwangslager in Brandenburg” he aims to provide a social history of the Nazi camp system in Brandenburg, focusing not only on concentration camps, but also on POW camps and forced labour camps.

He is particularly interested in the influence of WWII and German occupation on the Nazi camp system as well as the changing relations between the camps and their neighbouring communities throughout the war. 

During his stay at the Center for Holocaust Studies Kolja will examine court records as well as memoirs, eyewitness accounts and interviews of the USC Shoah Foundation. 

Sara Jevtić is a PhD candidate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She holds a Bachelor degree in Eastern European Studies and a Master degree in Eastern European History and Slavic Studies from the University of Basel. 

Her doctoral project is a micro-historical research of relationship constellations, interactions and interrelationships during the Second World War in occupied Serbia. Using the example of the border town of Šabac, the research aims to answer questions related to occupation, collaboration and resistance, as well as escape, persecution and genocide “from bellow”. She is primarily interested in transregional and transnational interactions as well as social processes regarding the Holocaust.

During her stay at the Center for Holocaust Studies, she will examine official documents, such as military documents and orders, regarding the Holocaust in Serbia and the concentration camp in Šabac.

Beatrice Leeming is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge in History. She obtained an MPhil in Modern European History, also from Cambridge. Her doctoral research considers the dialogue between former concentration camps and their visitors since the 1990s, primarily the phenomenon of Holocaust Tourism and its contribution to the ongoing imperative of Holocaust remembrance. She considers the presentation of space and memory in topographical, digits and curatorial dimension. The research takes a transnational, comparative approach to ask if, and how, the ‘voice of the visitor’ alters the way sites navigate changes to their functions in anticipation of and beyond the twenty-first century. Her material includes visitors’ books, memorial ‘offerings’, as well as tourist literature. Working in anticipation of a crux in temporal as much as spatial witnessing, this project is an attempt to understand how sites have and will continue to maintain their significance in dialogue with the diverse audiences they work with.

Whilst at the centre, she will work closely with the proximate historic sites, such as Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. She will also consult the archives of the IfZ itself, in particular its efforts to work with its public in research conferences and seminars.

Laura Miñano-Mañero works as an assistant professor at the University of Valencia, Spain, at the Department of English and German Philology. She holds a PhD from the University of Valencia in the field of sociolinguistics, with a thesis focused on language contact in Nazi concentration camps. In 2023, Miñano-Mañero published the book Contacto de lenguas en espacios extremos: el universo concentracionario (Language Contact in the Concentrationary Universe) and several research articles relating to Holocaust literature authored by survivors. Her current research explores Holocaust testimony and postmemorial literature from a gendered perspective, with emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Laura Miñano-Mañero has been awarded an EHRI fellowship at the IfZ for her project Revealing Silences: Voiceless Traces of Gendered Trauma in Female Holocaust Survivors’ Testimony. In connection with Holocaust narratives, this project explores the different ways in which silence is used both conscious and unconsciously to convey the gendered experience of women, particularly that of sexual violence.

Alexander Williams is a lecturer of contemporary history and PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. By focusing on survivor testimonies concerning the former Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps—Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka—his research explores why extermination camp inmates viewed themselves as spectral entities; as human ghosts who thought themselves as belonging neither to the living nor the dead. By analysing the spatiotemporal narrative elements within these testimonies through methodologies inspired by literature, philosophy and astrophysics he attempts to answer why this was so. Prior to receiving his Research Master’s degree in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam in 2020, Alexander worked as a teacher and guidance counselor at a vocational college. He is also affiliated with the Dutch Sobibor Foundation and co-manages the European Journal of Life Writing.