Professor Dan Stone Named the 2023-2024 Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Professor Dan Stone, a renowned historian of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in April and deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture entitled “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History” on April 8, 2024.

“We are very honored to welcome Dan Stone, an internationally distinguished Holocaust scholar. His research and publications span across the 20th century and beyond. While focusing on the history and historiography of the Holocaust, he also illuminates the historical precursors as well as the aftermath of this genocide,” said Center Founding Director, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, and Professor of History Wolf Gruner.

USC Shoah Foundation Director of Academic Programs Dr. Jennifer Rodgers welcomed the selection of Stone for the residency. “I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Dan Stone for well over a decade," Dr. Rodgers said. “I have long been impressed by his work, including his thoughtful approach to the human side of the postwar experience. His breadth of research makes him an especially fitting recipient of the Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence fellowship.”

Stone is a Professor of Modern History and the Director of the Holocaust Research Institute (HRI) at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has been teaching at Royal Holloway since 1999, where was awarded Annual Doctoral Supervision Award in 2020 for his commitment and excellence in supervising doctoral candidates. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust: Challenging Histories (London: Routledge, 2021), Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015), and his most recent volumes Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) and The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (London: Penguin Books, 2023 / New York: Mariner Books, 2024), which has been or will be published in Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Romanian, Polish, Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish translations.

In addition to his own research, as the director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Stone is the program director of the first interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies MA in the United Kingdom. In this position, the Holocaust Research Institute joined the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership with the Wiener Holocaust Library. Stone also chaired the academic advisory board for the redesign of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Galleries and is a member of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s Experts Reference Groups. He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of many journals, including the Journal of Holocaust Research and the Journal of Genocide Research, where he served as co-editor for 14 years.

Stone has been the recipient of many research fellowships and awards, including numerous grants from the Pears Foundation and Holocaust Educational Foundation to support Royal Holloway’s biennial residential Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization. In 2023, his book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Non-fiction Crown Awards. His 2015 book The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize in 2016. In 2020, Stone was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education’s award for Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year.

Intended to inspire prominent scholars, the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund was established through a gift by longtime USC Shoah Foundation Executive Committee and Board of Councilors member Mickey Shapiro. The fund enables one senior scholar to spend time in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Shoah Foundation. This prestigious fellowship for luminaries in the field of Holocaust Studies is available through invitation only.

The fellowship offers senior scholars the opportunity to use the Holocaust and genocide resources at USC, particularly the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which contains more than 55,000 testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, including the testimony of Sara Shapiro, and related unique resources and collections.

Stone is the eighth Shapiro Scholar in Residence, following previous Shapiro Scholars Jan Grabowski (2022-2023), Sara R. Horowitz (2020-2021), Peter Hayes (2019-2020), Marion Kaplan (2018-2019), Christopher R. Browning (2017-2018), Omer Bartov (2016-2017), and inaugural Shapiro Scholar David Cesarani (2015-2016).