Welcome Julie Dawson, Fortunoff Fellow

Please join us in welcoming Julie Dawson, as a Fortunoff Fellow, thanks to funding from Christie's Americas.

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.

During her fellowship, Dawson will survey the collection for materials related to the expropriation of property of the Jews of Vienna during the Nazi period as part of a research effort being conducted at the Freud Museum.