Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. She received a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Barnard College. For her J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship, Dr. Suleiman is conducting research for her project “The Holocaust in Heritage: Irene Némirovsky, Her Daughters, and the ‘Jewish Question’ in France.”

Professor Suleiman is the author of many books on modern literature and culture as well as autobiographical work and poetry. Her most recent book, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2006), examines the effect of World War II on writers who emerged from that traumatic experience. Her other works include the memoir, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Harvard University Press, 1994); Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Harvard University Press, 1990); and Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (Columbia University Press, 1983). She has also edited or co-edited many works, including with Christie McDonald, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (Columbia University Press, forthcoming); with Éva Forgács, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary: An Anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2003); and Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers,Outsiders, Backward Glances (Duke University Press, 1998). She is currently collaborating with Jakob Lothe and James Phelan on After Testimony: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. She is a member of the editorial boards of the scholarly journals Comparative Literature, Etudes Littéraires, and History and Memory.

Professor Suleiman has served as Chair of the Department of Literature and Comparative Literature and as Head of the French Section, Director of Graduate Studies in French, and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She served as Vice-President and President of the American Comparative Literature Association and held several positions at the Modern Language Association (MLA). Professor Suleiman is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. She was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for distinguished achievement by Harvard University and held the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at the University of London. Her other fellowships include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She was decorated by the French government as an Officer of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

During her tenure at the Center, Professor Suleiman is researching the life and work of Irène Némirovsky in relation to questions of Jewish identity in France before, during, and after the Holocaust. A well-known author in France before World War II, Némirovsky was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and died there. Her work was forgotten for many years and was only revived starting in the 1990s, thanks to her daughters, who survived the war as hidden children. The younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, wrote a creative biography of Némirovsky in the form of an imaginary memoir, as well as a novel about her own experiences as a child during the war. The older daughter, Denise Epstein-Dauplé, transcribed the manuscript of Suite Française, Némirovsky’s masterpiece that became an international bestseller sixty years after the author’s death. Professor Suleiman is exploring Némirovsky’s relationship with her own Jewishness—complex, ambivalent, and often troubled—and her daughters’ relationships to their deceased parents, especially their mother. Issues of identity, memory, and creativity will intersect to portray the rare combination of generations of writers in a single family of Holocaust victim and survivors. Professor Suleiman is using the Museum’s extensive archival collection and library resources to complete her research.

Professor Susan Rubin Suleiman may be contacted via e-mail at ssuleiman@ushmm.org.

Oleg Budnitskii is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Academic Director of the International Center for Russian and Eastern European Jewish Studies in Moscow, and Professor of History in the Department of Jewish Studies at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University. He received a Ph.D. in historical sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Russian History in Moscow, and an M.A. in history from Rostov State Pedagogical Institute in Russia. For his Ina Levine Invitational Scholar Fellowship, Professor Budnitskii is conducting research for his project “‘From Soviet to Jewish’: The War Experience and Evolution of Soviet Jewish Identity.”

Professor Budnitskii is the author of Den’gi russkoi emigratsii: Kolchakovskoe zoloto. 1918-1957 (Money of the Russian Emigration: Kolchak’s Gold; Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008); Rossiiskie evrei mezhdy krasnymi i belymi, 1917-1920 (Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), an English translation of which is being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press; and Terrorism v rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii: ideologiia, etika, psikhologiia (Terrorism in the Russian Liberation Movement: Ideology, Ethics, Psychology; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000). He has edited and contributed to many books, including, Evreiskaia emigratsiia iz Rossii 1881-2005 (Jewish Emigration from Russia, 1881-2005; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006); Archiv evreiskoi istorii (Archive of Jewish History, vols. 1-5; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004-2007), for which he served as editor-in-chief; Russko-evreiskaia kul’tura (Russian-Jewish Culture; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006); Mirovoi krisis 1914-1920 godov i sud’ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva (The World Crisis of 1914-1920 and the Fate of East European Jewry; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005); and Istoriia i cul’tura rossiiskogo I vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva: novye istochniki, novye podhody (History and Culture of Russian and East European Jewry: New Sources, New Approaches; Moscow: Dom evreiskoi knigi, 2004).

Professor Budnitiskii is a member of the dissertation council at the Russian State University for the Humanities, serves as editor-in-chief of the Archive of Jewish History, and is on the editorial board of several scholarly journals, including Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (University of Maryland, College Park), Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Istorik i Khudokhnik (Historian and Artist; Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow). He is the recipient of various honors and awards, including a Skirball Fellowship from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University, a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship in the Department of History at Stanford University, a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and an IREX Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. He is the former head of the Department of Russian History at Rostov State Pedagogical University and former Professor of History at the Jewish University in Moscow.

During his tenure at the Center, Professor Budnitskii is conducting research for his manuscript on Soviet Jewish identity through the lens of the Soviet Jewish military experience of World War II. He is exploring the ways Soviet Jews self-identified, how their wartime experience on or around the frontlines affected their attitudes toward their ethnicity and nationality, and how these factors, and others, eventually contributed to the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. Professor Budnitskii is utilizing the Museum’s extensive archival collections, including transcripts of oral histories of Ukrainian (Soviet) Jews from the project, “Jewish Fates-Ukraine 20th Century,” which contain stories of World War II veterans, personal collections, letters, and other documents, as well as the collection of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which contains numerous letters of Jewish soldiers and officers of the Red Army and other materials relating to the fate of Soviet Jews from 1941-1945.

Professor Oleg Budnitskii may be contacted via e-mail at obudnitskiy@ushmm.org.