Fellowships

Judith LinFortunoff Fellow

Judith Lin is a writer and researcher of the Sephardic Holocaust experience. She completed her PhD as a Rachel Winer Manon Jewish Studies fellow at the University of Virginia. After many years working with face-to-face with survivors, Judith has developed listening strategies that rely on trust, multilingualism, and co-created memory. Judith’s work combines analysis of oral testimonies with archival papers and collected writings in Ladino. Her first monograph, Belonging to Exile: Sephardic Homelands through Poetry, discusses the different national geographies that appealed to Sephardic Holocaust survivors after the war. Her second book-length project, Membranza: Listening to Sephardic Voices touched by the Holocaust, explores relationship between language and visceral memory in testimonies that have been recorded in Ladino.

Lida DodouFortunoff Fellow

Lida Dodou is a historian who specializes on Salonika’s Jews during the 19th and 20th centuries. She has also worked as an educator and editor and she has collaborated with cultural institutions. Her research focuses on eras of transition and the impact on Jewish Salonika. Various fellowships have taken her across Europe, and she has worked and published on a variety of subjects, from early 19th century Salonikan Jewish business networks, to Jewish migration from Salonika to the Habsburg Empire and its successor states and antisemitism as a decision-making factor.

Evlampia TsireliArtist-in-Residence

Dr. Tsireli is an author and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History and Archaeology, School of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). During her fellowship at AUTH, Tsireli will conduct research on the life and testimony of Samuel Profeta. Profeta, known to the Jews of Thessaloniki as “Uncle Sam”, and an important figure in the community,  dedicated his life to working with children after war. Her goal is to produce a graphic novel based on Profeta’s Ladino testimony in the Fortunoff Archive. This will be the first time that a Greek survivor’s testimony is used as the basis for a graphic novel in Greece.

The novel will be published in Ladino and Greek. Tsireli hopes this recounting of Profeta’s lifestory and work can have a profound social and pedagogical impact on present and future generations in Greece. The novel will also center the Ladino language as carrier of Sephardic Jewish culture.

Dr.  Tsireli’s professional accomplishments as an author, her academic background in Theology, Biblical Archaeology, Jewish history, and her knowledge of Ladino, will serve her well in this effort.

Grzegorz KwiatkowskiArtist-in-Residence

Kwiatkowski has earned international recognition for both his poetry and his activism. His literary works, including the acclaimed collection Crops, tackle profound themes of violence, genocide, and human rights. Translated by Peter Constantine, Crops has been published in the United States, and beyond. Kwiatkowski’s poetry is not merely a reflection on the past, but an urgent call to confront the realities of hatred and violence in the present. He conducts readings and speaks regularly at universities around the world.

Kwiatkowski is also an activist who helped uncover nearly half a million pairs of shoes left to decay near the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Kwiatkowski has been fighting for the site to be preserved and recognized officially as a site of memory.

During his residency at the Fortunoff Archive, Kwiatkowski will combine testimony, historical research, and his artistic vision to create a new work that speaks to the enduring importance of remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust. He plans to exhibit this work in both Gdańsk and at Yale University, further bridging the historical connection between Poland and the wider world.