Rosenberg Senior Scholar
William Rosenberg was born in Czestochowa, Poland in 1929. The only survivor of his family of seven children, he was incarcerated in seven concentration camps. As president of the New Haven Farband and the New Haven survivors fellowship group, Willy was instrumental in the founding of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (HSFP). He was a tireless advocate for the HSFP and later for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
Current Fellows
Wendy Lower2021 William Rosenberg Senior Scholar
Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. She received her BA in History and German from Hamilton College, and PhD in History from American University in 1999. Lower chairs the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served as Acting Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the USHMM (2016-2018). As a German Research Foundation Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich (2007- 2012), Lower introduced courses on the Holocaust, collected testimonies of perpetrators and bystanders, and successfully co-led an initiative to establish a federally funded German Center for Holocaust studies at the Institute for Contemporary History. Dr. Lower is the author of Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (2011); and co- editor (with Ray Brandon) of Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (2008). Her book, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been translated into 23 languages. Her next book, The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed, will be published in February 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Jonathan Petropoulos2021 William Rosenberg Senior Scholar
Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. Previously, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1990), where he also had an appointment as a Lecturer in History and History & Literature. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983, when he commenced graduate work in history and art history. From 1998 to 2000, Dr. Petropoulos served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report, Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims’ Assets (2001). In this capacity as Research Director, he supervised a staff of researchers who combed archives in the United States and Europe in order to understand better how representatives of the U.S. government (including the Armed Forces) handled the assets of Holocaust victims both during and after the war. As Research Director, he provided expert testimony to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport in the U.K. House of Commons and to the Banking and Finance Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the author of Art as Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2000); Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2006); Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2014), and has helped edit a number of other volumes. He has a forthcoming book, titled “Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and his World,” which will be published in January 2021 by Yale University Press.
Rafal Wnuk2021 William Rosenberg Senior Scholar
Rafal Wnuk is Professor at the Catholic University of Lublin. He is a Polish historian specializing in the history of the anti-German and anti-Soviet resistance in the Central Europe during and after WWII, the history of totalitarian systems, museology and politics of memory. Author several books, including: Za pierwszego Sowieta. Polska konspiracja na Kresach Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej (wrzesień 1939-czerwiec 1941) (Under the first Soviet: Polish underground in the Second Republic’s Eastern territories (September 1939-June 1941) from 2007; Wojna po wojnie. Antysowieckie podziemie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1944-1953, (A War after the War. The anti-Soviet Underground in East Central Europe in 1944-53) from 2012, with co-authors: Grzegorz Motyka, Tomasz Stryjek, Adam F. Baran; Leśni Bracia. His lateste work is Podziemie antykomunistyczne na Litwie. Łotwie i w Estonii. 1944-1956 (Forest Brothers. Anti-Communist underground in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia 1944-1956) from 2018. Rafał Wnuk was the editor-in-chief of Atlas polskiego podziemia niepodległościowego 1944-1956 (Atlas of the Polish pro-independence underground, 1944-1956) and editor-in-chief of the semi-annual publication of the Institute of National Remembrance Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość. (Remembrance and Justice) from 2002 to 2009. He is the author of numerous scientific articles, educational programs, and a curator of historical exhibitions.