Junior Fellowships 2024/25 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) invites applications for its junior fel-lowships for the academic year 2024/25.

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the research and documentation of antisemi-tism, racism, nationalism and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesen-thal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the Federal Chancellery 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.

PhD-candidates from anywhere in the world are eligible to apply for a junior fellowship. Junior fellows will be able to work on a research project of their choice in the field of Holocaust studies at the Institute. Beyond the research work itself, the stay at the Institute is intended to encour-age communication and scientific exchange among the fellows at the Institute. Junior fellows will receive support and advice from the VWI as well as its senior and research fellows. Junior fellows are expected to regularly attend the VWI and take on an active role in the Institute’s research activities.

Research projects are to focus on a topic relevant to the research interests of the VWI. Within this parameter, applicants are free to choose their own topic, approach, and methodology. Fel-lows will have access to the archives of the Institute. It is expected that fellows will make use of relevant resources from the collection in their research projects. Research results will be the sub-ject of formal fellows’ discussions and will be presented to the wider public at regular intervals. At the end of their stay, fellows are required to submit a research paper which will be peer-reviewed and published in VWI’s e-journal S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.

Junior fellowships are awarded for a duration of between six and eleven months. Experience tells that residencies between nine and eleven months are the most productive for facilitating the research of the fellows at the VWI. Junior fellows will have a working space at the VWI and In-ternet access and will receive a monthly stipend of € 1,400.-. In addition, junior fellows who are not Vienna residents will receive accommodation funding of € 600.- per month. VWI will also cover the costs of a round-trip to and from Vienna (coach class airfare or 2nd class train fare). There is an additional one-off payment of € 200.- available for research conducted outside of Vienna or photocopying costs outside of the Institute, where applicable.

Junior fellows will be selected by the International Academic Advisory Board of the VWI.

Applications may be submitted in English or German and must include the following documents:

• completed application form,
• a detailed description of the research project, including the objectives, an overview of existing research on the topic and methodology (12,000-character max.),
• two letters of recommendation (please indicate when sent separately),
• list of publications (if applicable),
• a CV (optional: with picture).

Please send your application in electronic format (in one integral *.pdf-file) with the subject header “VWI Junior Fellowships 2024/25” by 12 January 2024 to:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

If you do not get confirmation that we have received your proposal, please contact us.

Junior Fellowships 2025/26 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) invites applications for its junior fellowships for the academic year 2025/26.

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the research and documentation of antisemitism, racism, nationalism and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the Federal Chancellery 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.

PhD-candidates from anywhere in the world are eligible to apply for a junior fellowship. Junior fellows will be able to work on a research project of their choice in the field of Holocaust studies at the Institute. Beyond the research work itself, the stay at the Institute is intended to encourage communication and scientific exchange among the fellows at the Institute. Junior fellows will receive support and advice from the VWI as well as its senior and research fellows. Junior fellows are expected to regularly attend the VWI and take on an active role in the Institute’s research activities.

Research projects are to focus on a topic relevant to the research interests of the VWI. Within this parameter, applicants are free to choose their own topic, approach, and methodology. Fellows will have access to the archives of the Institute. It is expected that fellows will make use of relevant resources from the collection in their research projects. Research results will be the subject of formal fellows’ discussions and will be presented to the wider public at regular intervals. At the end of their stay, fellows are required to submit a research paper which will be peer-reviewed and published in VWI’s e-journal S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.

Junior fellowships are awarded for a duration of between six and eleven months. Experience tells that residencies between nine and eleven months are the most productive for facilitating the research of the fellows at the VWI. Junior fellows will have a working space at the VWI and In-ternet access and will receive a monthly stipend of € 1,400.-. In addition, junior fellows who are not Vienna residents will receive accommodation funding of € 600.- per month. VWI will also cover the costs of a round-trip to and from Vienna (coach class airfare or 2nd class train fare).

Junior fellows will be selected by the International Academic Advisory Board of the VWI.

Applications may be submitted in English or German and must include the following documents:

• completed application form,
• a detailed description of the research project, including the objectives, an overview of existing research on the topic and methodology (12,000-character max.),
• two letters of recommendation (please indicate when sent separately),
• list of publications (if applicable),
• a CV (optional: with picture).

Please send your application in electronic format (in one integral *.pdf-file) with the subject header “VWI Junior Fellowships 2025/26” by 17 January 2025 to:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

If you do not get confirmation that we have received your proposal, please contact us.

Junior Fellowships 2026/27 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) invites applications for its junior fellowships for the academic year 2026/27.

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the research and documentation of antisemitism, racism, nationalism and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Women Science and Research, the Federal Chancellery 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.

PhD candidates from anywhere in the world are eligible to apply for a junior fellowship. Junior fellows will be able to work on a research project of their choice in the field of Holocaust studies at the Institute. Beyond the research work itself, the stay at the Institute is intended to encourage communication and scientific exchange among the fellows. Junior fellows will receive support and advice from the VWI as well as its senior and research fellows. Junior fellows are expected to attend the VWI regularly and take on an active role in the Institute’s research activities.

Research projects are to focus on a topic relevant to the research interests of the VWI. Within this parameter, applicants are free to choose their own topic, approach, and methodology. Fellows will have access to the archives of the Institute. It is expected that fellows will make use of relevant resources from the collection in their research projects. Research results will be the subject of formal fellows’ discussions and will be presented to the wider public at regular intervals. At the end of their stay, fellows are required to submit a research paper, which will be peer-reviewed and published in the VWI’s e-journal S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.

Junior fellowships are awarded for a duration of ten months. Junior fellows will have a working space with internet access at the VWI and will receive a monthly stipend of € 1,400.-. In addition, junior fellows who are not Vienna residents will receive accommodation funding of € 600.- per month. The VWI will also cover the costs of a round-trip to and from Vienna (coach class airfare or 2nd class train fare). If you are based in Vienna (Vienna resident), we cannot reimburse you for the housing costs.

Junior fellows will be selected by the International Academic Advisory Board of the VWI.

Applications may be submitted in English or German and must include the following documents:

• completed application form,
  
• a detailed description of the research project, including the objectives, an overview of existing research on the topic, and methodology (12,000-character max.),
  
• two letters of recommendation (please indicate if sent separately),
  
• list of publications (if applicable),
  
• a CV (optional: with picture).

Please send your application in electronic format (in one integral *.pdf-file) with the subject header “VWI Junior Fellowships 2026/27” by 16 January 2026 to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

If you do not get confirmation that we have received your proposal, please contact us.

Yulia Abibok

Junior Fellow (10/2022 – 08/2023)

Victims, Perpetrators and "Our Guys": Interethnic Relations and Mass Massacres in Eastern Galicia

The research is focused on Second World war events in the former powiat trembowelski (in the territory of Ternopil region in today's Ukraine). This is an attempt to look at the history of the Second World War from the perspective of members of a relatively small multicultural community. The project aims to establish the general picture of life in 1917-1945 in powiat trembowelski and then to look at the problem at the microlevel by researching and analysing several personal stories of people of Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish origin from the area to demonstrate the entire complicity of relations during that period, as well as ideas and reasons behind those relations. The general idea of the research is to follow and explain individual choices of perpetrators, lifesavers as well as bystanders made in extreme circumstances which stimulated identity-based groupings and divisions. Bystanders are not regarded as an absolute and single category which is entirely opposite to both perpetrators and saviors.

Yulia Abibok, researcher (Jewish Studies) and journalist, studies Comparative History at the Central European University. Her research interests include territorial and interethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe and the (post-)Soviet space; group identity building and propaganda; social transformations, business relations and organised crime in the 1990s in post-Soviet countries.

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Emil Kjerte

Junior Fellow (10/2022 – 07/2023)

Ustaša Killing Specialists: The Personnel of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp Complex

The dissertation focuses on those men and women who served as guards in the concentration and death camp Jasenovac, the epicentre of state-organised extermination in the fascist Independent State of Croatia. Drawing on records from post-war trials in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and testimonies of survivors, the social backgrounds and motivation of the guards for their voluntary service will be explored. The broad spectrum of violent acts committed by the guards will be analysed.

Drawing on theories on the microdynamics of violence and insights from the historiography of Holocaust perpetrators, the connections between the use of violence and group-internal relationships within the guards will be examined. The focus is on the interplay between violence and identity formation. In addition, the violence against the civilian population in the vicinity of the camp will be analysed and the careers of the Jasenovac perpetrators in the post-war period will be examined.

Emil Kjerte, PhD student at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. B.A. in History at the University of Copenhagen and M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Uppsala University. Fellowships from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

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Lukas Nievoll

Junior Fellow (02/2022-07/2022)

The Violent Order of Space: Spatial Development and Dynamics of Violence at Gusen Concentration Camp

My PhD-project deals with the relationship between space and violence in Nazi concentration camps, using the example of the Gusen concentration camp(s) from 1939 to 1945. I analyze how the spatial structure of the camp was changed over time and how this corresponded with the dynamics of violence. From a bottom-up perspective, I also investigate how prisoners experienced and shaped the changing physical and social reality of the camp.

Lukas Nievoll is a historian and, since October 2021, a university assistant at the Institute for Modern History and Contemporary History at the Johannes Kepler University Linz where he also pursues his Ph.D. Since 2021 he has also been a Doctoral Fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. Between 2019 and 2021 Lukas Nievoll worked at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Karl Franzens University Graz in the research project Digital Memory Landscape - Persecution and Resistance under National Socialism.

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Suzanne Swartz
Junior Fellow (10/2014 - 08/2015)

Hidden Encounters: Interactions among Jewish and Christian Children in Nazi-Occupied Warsaw

This project examines the illegal, clandestine, and chance interactions among Jewish and Christian children in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Encounters most frequently came about through some form of resistance to Nazi authority. Contact took place within spaces that children created for themselves, such as smuggling or peddling rings, and within spaces or circumstances constructed or controlled by adults, such as orphanages, convents, or private homes where families hid Jews. Children’s interactions in dangerous situations were often complex combinations of both peaceful and combative, and motivations for assisting each other moved within gray areas of altruism and self-survival. This study examines children’s encounters in wartime spaces and across boundaries, to demonstrate how children moved within and pushed against limitations of Nazi oppression.

Suzanne Swartz is a History PhD candidate at Stony Brook University in New York, where she received her M.A. in 2013. B.A.: Colby College, 2007. Past program participation: German Historical Institute's Archival Seminar, Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program. In 2012 she was a Lipper Intern for Holocaust Education at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Research interests: children's resistance, Polish-Jewish relations, memory, Holocaust education.

Sari J. Siegel

Junior Fellow (03/2015 - 08/2015)

Between Coercion and Resistance. Jewish Prisoner-Physicians in Nazi-Camps

The research examines an important yet widely overlooked group in Holocaust history—Jewish inmates who utilized their medical knowledge in Nazi camps. Focusing on the labour, concentration, and extermination camp systems in the Reich between 1938 and 1945, it draws particular attention to the dynamic natures of camp conditions and the prisoner-physicians’ strategies to save their own lives as they attempted to treat fellow inmates and uphold their Hippocratic promise to ‚do no harm.‘ The work combines survivor testimonies and legal documents with contemporary government and organisational records for insight into how contextual variables and individual traits shaped the actions of these doctors in the camps. Since the prisoner-physicians’ medical activities placed them within survivor and memoirist Primo Levi’s ‚gray zone‘, analysis of their behavioral shifts allows to illuminate a new aspect of this morally ambiguous realm.

Sari Siegel is a doctoral student supervised by Prof. Wolf Gruner at the Univ. of Southern California. Born and raised in New York, she received her BA with Distinction in History from Yale Univ. She is the American recipient of the 2014 IfZ-USHMM Exchange of Scholars Award and a 2014-15 Kagan Fellow. She has presented her research at several international conferences, and her article Treating Dr. Maximilian Samuel: A Case Study of an Auschwitz Prisoner-Doctor will appear in a forthcoming issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Justyna Majewska
Junior Fellow (11/2018–05/2019)

Visions of the Social Changes in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1942

Analysing social changes that emerged in the Jewish community when trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, my doctoral dissertation explores these shifts through the lenses of Jews, Nazi Germans, and Poles.
Drawing on social studies theories, I examine the Warsaw Ghetto as an area of various, rapid, and traumatic social changes. Originating in terror, plunder, and separation, these led to the pauperisation and degradation of social structures. My analysis is fixed between 1940 and 1942, when the isolated Jewish community was most susceptible to changes in social structure. Nevertheless, I show that various social and political processes had their origins in the 1930s and beyond.

First, I analyse the process behind the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto. Starting from the Nazi understanding of the term ghetto before the war, I scrutinise the process of establishing the Warsaw Ghetto in comparison to other ghettos in occupied Poland and in the context of the “Nisko” and “Madagaskar” resettlement plans.

Fears and predictions regarding life in the ghetto were core elements of the Jewish perspective. Responses to the imposed reality were rooted in personal experiences as well as the history of the persecution of Jews across Europe. Although the Nazis saw the Jewish community in the ghetto as homogeneous, it was a complex group. In the imposed ghetto reality, various political circles remained active. Zionists, Socialists, and Bundists, acculturated and religious Jews pondered not only how to survive the present but also their future. Intense debates focussed on the expected social structure of Jewry, the language Jews would speak, education, and the professions the post-war generation would pursue.

Finally, my dissertation addresses the issue of the Polish perspective on the ghetto phenomenon. Starting from Polish ideas of dealing with national minorities proposed by Polish right-wing politicians and intellectuals in 1930s, I aim to examine the extent to which Poles, especially the intelligentsia, were able to change their pre-war negative attitude towards Jews.
In the dissertation, I will use documents from the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum Archive) as well as other wartime and post-war documents from the Jewish Historical Institute at Yad Vashem and the USHMM. I will also use documents of German authorities and draw from the Polish press and diaries of intelligentsia.

Justyna Majewska is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. She works in the Research Department of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Polish scholarly journal Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały (Holocaust Studies and Materials).

She received her MA in Cultural Studies from the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and completed a postgraduate certificate course in Exhibiting Contemporary History at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. She was an EHRI fellow at the Yad Vashem Institute. She is an editor of the Kalisz letters published by the Jewish Historical Institute in a series of scholarly editions of documents from the Ringelblum Archive. She has published in Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały and East European Jewish Affairs.

Maayan Armelin

Junior Fellow (10/2020 – 3/2021)

Leadership Styles and Social Relations in the SS-Einsatzgruppen

This doctoral dissertation studies the SS-Einsatzgruppen, mobile squads who murdered over a million and a half Jewish and non-Jewish civilians in the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. The project explores officers’ leadership styles and particular social relations within the units and how these affected members’ apparent willingness to perpetrate mass murder. The research draws on historical literature discussing cohesion and comradeship in military and paramilitary units during the Second World War and traces the operating structures, cultures, and social relations of various institutions under the Nazi regime. Combining social psychological concepts such as social identity theory, inter-group relations, leadership, and conformity, the project analyses testimonies of former Einsatzgruppen members given in postwar Germany and Austria. It explains how crucial patterns of leadership and peer relations encouraged individual Einsatzgruppen members to engage in mass violence.

Maayan Armelin is a PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She holds a BA in History and Psychology and an MA in Social Psychology from the University of Haifa. She has received fellowships from the Claims Conference (2014–2019) and EHRI (2017–2018) and previously worked at the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research at the University of Haifa and on the editorial board of the Journal of Holocaust Research.

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