Loyola professor receives $140,000 grant from National Endowment for the Humanities

Janine Holc, Ph.D., professor and chair of political science at Loyola University Maryland, received a $140,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will fund collaborative research and writing about the lives of Jewish girls and women during the Holocaust.

“This is important work, and we are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding it,” said Frank D. Golom, Ph.D., ’04, dean of Loyola College, the University’s school of arts and sciences. “Dr. Holc is a renowned scholar. There is no doubt that the insights she and her colleagues uncover will contribute much not only to our historical knowledge of the Holocaust, but also to the challenges we continue to face with antisemitism, even today.”

Holc will join Marta Kubiszyn, Ph.D., associate professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Poland, on the project “Autograph Albums as Holocaust Objects.” Autograph albums are booklets of blank pages young Europeans would keep and circulate among friends to collect personal notes, signatures, inside jokes, riddles, poems, drawings, and other messages.

Young Jewish women kept their autograph albums with them and asked new friends to inscribe them even in ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust. As part of the grant, Holc and Kubiszyn will co-author a book that collects and examines autograph albums from the Holocaust held in archives in the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and Europe.

“This project will bring attention to the importance of creativity and personal writing in the study of Jewish responses to persecution,” Holc said. “It will also document the importance of young people—especially girls—as historical actors.”

Preliminary research for the autograph albums project was supported by a faculty research grant from Loyola’s Office of Peace and Justice.

In addition, Holc co-authored with Kubiszyn the journal article “Autograph albums as Holocaust objects: hapticity, futurity, trauma” published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies this year. Previously, Holc wrote the book “The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust,” which collects the testimonies of hundreds of Polish-Jewish girls and young women in slave labor camps during World War II.

Holc recently offered a Peace and Justice faculty lunch talk, “Autograph Albums as Holocaust Objects,” at Loyola giving a glimpse into the emotional lives of children deportees, said Heidi Shaker, Ph.D., director of the Office of Peace and Justice and associate professor of modern languages and literatures.

“Her talk was as moving as it was informative, showing how girls functioned inside spaces of persecution, and what these autograph books meant to their owners,” Shaker said. “The Office of Peace and Justice is honored to be associated with such important and meaningful scholarship, and we are thrilled to learn that she has been awarded an NEH grant to continue this research. We know the outcome will be nothing short of a revelation.”