Julie Fitzpatrick Awarded 2023-2024 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship

Julie Fitzpatrick, a PhD candidate in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been awarded the 2023-2024 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center for a month from mid-October to mid-November 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, which is currently entitled "‘Light the Candles and Lay the Table’: A Study on German-Jewish Women’s Relationship with Food During the Prewar, Wartime and Postwar Eras."

In her dissertation research, Fitzpatrick is investigating how German Jews ate – and what they ate – before, during, and after the Holocaust and how German Jewish women interacted with food, cooking, and domestic work, including during periods of intense food insecurity, persecution, and mass migration. She is examining a multitude of topics, including the abundance or absence of food, where food came from, how food was prepared, distributed, and consumed, how notions of edible and inedible foods changed for German Jews as conditions were rapidly changing around them, and how themes of gender and class intersect with these questions and her study of food, domestic life, and identity more broadly. In her project, Fitzpatrick uses food as the entryway to discover more about the German Jewish experience of the twentieth century, not only in Germany but along the journeys and in the places where German Jews emigrated, making it a transnational study.

Fitzpatrick’s research is based on a broad array of sources, including memoirs, diaries, recipe books, personal belongings, photographs, and oral history testimonies. At the Center, she’ll be analyzing Holocaust survivor testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and exploring archival materials in the USC Libraries Special Collections, such as etiquette manuals, cookbooks, propaganda, and private papers.

Fitzpatrick earned her BA in History at the University of Bristol and earned her MA in History with Distinction at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her master's thesis was entitled “‘Eating? No. They Slurp, Gurgle, Drink, Tilt the Bowls to Swallow the Last Drop’: A Study on Hunger and the Foodways of the Holocaust.” 

Fitzpatrick has presented numerous papers at conferences for both specialist and non-specialist academic audiences, including at the Imperial War Museum, the Institute of Historical Research, and the German Historical Institute London. She has an upcoming article on food and prewar migration experiences that will be published in a special issue of the journal Holocaust Studies. Additionally, she has participated in a number of research initiatives at Royal Holloway and the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. 

The Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other unique USC research resources. The fellowship enables the recipient to spend one month in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research during the academic year and to deliver a public lecture about his or her research. The fellowship is made possible through the generosity of Gerald Breslauer, Mickey Rutman, and Tammy Anderson.