Clark University graduate students Jody Russell Manning, Elizabeth P. Anthony and recent graduate Angela L. Woodmansee are spending the 2010-11 academic year studying abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. The three scholars were selected on the basis of academic or professional achievements, as well as for their demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.
Jody Russell Manning spent the summer performing research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., before traveling to Germany and Poland. He is currently working with Professor Marek Kucia, an expert on Auschwitz and Holocaust memory, who serves as the director of the Institute of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Manning is staying in the city of Oświęcim while he conducts his doctoral research, and is cooperating with the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz -Birkenau State Museum.
Manning is spending his Fulbright year completing research on his dissertation, “Living in the Shadows of Auschwitz and Dachau: Memorial, Community, Symbolism and the Palimpsest of Memory,” a comparative socio-cultural history that analyzes the relationship between two Holocaust memorials and their surrounding communities.
“Although abundant research on Holocaust memory and its legacy exists… historians have largely marginalized or even ignored the voices and views belonging to the inhabitants of a city such as Oswiecim,” writes Manning. “My project is unique in its examination of disregarded local discussion.” Manning also hopes to broaden cooperation between Holocaust memorial sites—the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in particular—and U.S. institutions.
Manning is a Tapper Fellow for Graduate Studies in Holocaust History from Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He expects to receive his Ph.D. in Holocaust history in May of 2012.
Elizabeth Paige Anthony has been spending her Fulbright year conducting research in Austria before returning to write her dissertation, “Rückkehrer: Holocaust Survivors’ Repatriation to Austria.” With this work, she aims to “elucidate and analyze the experiences of Jews who returned to their native Austria after World War II, and will illuminate their motivations for reestablishing roots in their formerly Nazi Heimat.”
Anthony worked for six years as deputy director of survivor affairs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, spending much of her time with Holocaust survivors who had adopted the United States as home when they had none.
“Meeting survivors living in Austria provided a lens on a more complex, multilayered postwar history,” she writes. “How are we to understand their ease in an Austria that frequently whitewashes or even denies its Nazi past, and what does that tell us about postwar adaptation and identity?”
Anthony was also named a Fromson Fellow for Graduate Studies in Holocaust History and a Claims Conference Graduate Studies Fellow of the Strassler Center. She expects to receive her Ph.D. in history in May 2012.
Angela L Woodmansee, of Clark’s English Department, was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship award to Luxembourg. As Clark’s first Fulbright ETA to the Grand-Duchy, she is not only enrolled at the University of Luxembourg, but also teaches at a high school in Diekirch, where she leads English conversation classes. Woodmansee is involved as well in various cultural and academic activities, such as taking courses in the University of Luxembourg’s graduate program, Learning and Development in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts. More specifically, she focuses on graduate work in the area of discourse, identity and language policy.
Woodmansee graduated summa cum laude in May 2010 with her bachelor of arts degree and highest honors in English. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Woodmansee received the Virginia Mason Vaughan Award for Best Honors Thesis in Critical Analysis and the William H. Carter Jr. Award for Most Outstanding Rising Senior in the English Department. She was honored with the Henry J. Leir Student Conference Participation Award, so that she could participate in a conference in the Grand Duchy. She also received support from the Henry J. Leir Luxembourg Program-Clark University.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The Program operates in over 155 countries worldwide.
