Julie Dawson

Julie Dawson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna’s Institute for Contemporary History. Her dissertation examines postwar Jewish life in Romania through the lens of recently found diaries of a Transnistrian survivor. She previously studied at Columbia Univ. (MA) and Northwestern Univ. (BA, BM). Dawson worked for the Leo Baeck Institute from 2010-2019, directing their archival survey of Transylvania and Bukovina (jbat.lbi.org). From 2016-2019 she was researcher-in-residence in Mediaș for the EU Horizon 2020 project TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. She held a Fortunoff Fellowship (2020-2021) from Yale Univ. / VWI and a doctoral grant (2022-2024) from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. She is coeditor of Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices: Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins, a special issue of the VWI journal and has published in, amongst others, European Holocaust Studies Vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust and Quest. Issues in Contemp. Jewish History.

Research interests: Jewish Bukovina and Galicia, German-Jewish history, communist Romania, Transylvania, diary studies, women’s history, trauma and memory studies

Current research project: My dissertation project examines and contextualises a recently found set of German-language diaries written in Romania during the early postwar period by Blanka Lebzelter, a survivor of the Transnistrian Holocaust. The diaries testify to the quotidian struggles impoverished survivors faced in the aftermath of devastation and are a tremendous tool, providing multi-faceted entry-points for examining the experience of Jewish survivors in Romania after the war as well as for analysing manifestations of trauma in everyday life. Lebzelter’s writings indicate spaces in which individuals were able to perform acts of agency despite totalitarian strictures and also those places where the cold machinations of the totalitarian state devastated individual lives. They moreover shed light on cultural and social practices in Jewish life at the time, in particular into the operations of Romanian Zionist youth organizations in the late 1940s. Furthermore, as an inherently gendered source, the writings testify to the life of a young, single woman raised at the interface of tradition and modernity, struggling for a voice in a profoundly patriarchal nation. Working from the concept of diaries at the confluence of literature and history, my project employs interdisciplinary methods, grounded in biography, microhistorical approaches, and gender and women’s history, to analyse and contextualize Lebzelter’s writings and life. In my interpretation of the diaries and their content, I also employ the work of scholars of the “spatial turn” in Holocaust studies and approaches developed by historians of emotion. My project seeks not only to unearth the voice of one survivor long silenced, but through doing so, to shed light on the emotional experience of survivors in postwar Romania.

Publications (three most important):

Coeditor and “Introduction” with Marianne Windsperger, “Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices. Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins”, a Special Issue of S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods.Documentation. Vol. 10 No. 2, 2023.
“’As to my emotional anguish, there are days when I feel endlessly miserable…’: Hachsharot in Early Post-War Romania and the Limits of Belonging,” in “Training for Aliyah: Young Jews in Hachsharot across Europe between the 1930s and late 1940s,” eds. Verena Buser and Chiara Renzo, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC 21, no. 1, 2022: 155-184.
“’What meaning can the keeping of a diary have for a person like me’: Spaces of Survivor Agency under Postwar Oppression,” in European Holocaust Studies Vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust, ed. Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2021: 299-311.