Fortunoff Video Archive and Vienna Wiesenthal Institute announce joint fellowship

By Stephen Naron - August 21, 2018

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the study and documentation of antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Ministry of Science, Research and Economy as well as the City of Vienna. Research at the institute focuses on the Holocaust in its European context, including its antecedents and its aftermath. The VWI is one of the Fortunoff Video Archive’s 32 partner sites worldwide.

The Fortunoff Video Archive, a collection within the Manuscripts and Archives Department of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, holds more than 4,400 testimonies of survivors, witnesses and bystanders comprising over 10,000 hours of moving image material.

“Testimony has inspired many new theoretical and methodological approaches in the field of Holocaust studies,” said Eva Kovacs, VWI’s research program director. “Testimonies play an essential role in current history writing about the Shoah, and VWI wants to build a Central-European center of oral history research based on cooperation with the Fortunoff Video Archive.”

The VWI/Fortunoff Fellow will be based in Vienna and will conduct research on a topic of his/her choice in the field of Holocaust studies using the digital collection of the Fortunoff Archive as a foundation. Among other responsibilities, the fellow will choose a testimony from the Fortunoff collection and produce an annotated critical edition. This critical edition will include a transcript and notes that will help illuminate terms and places, as well as provide additional context to make often complex testimonies understandable to a broader readership. The critical edition will include a short introductory essay and will be made available online.

“We’re excited to expand the concept of the Fortunoff Archive’s Hartman fellowship program with a joint fellowship opportunity at VWI,” said Stephen Naron, director of the Fortunoff Video Archive. “This is an opportunity for the Archive to actively support scholarship in Europe based upon our testimonies.”

For more information on VWI vist their website: https://www.vwi.ac.at/