Dr. Shannon Woodcock

Professional Background

Dr. Shannon Woodcock received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Sydney, Australia, and an Honors degree in sociology and a B.A. in history from Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She has extensive teaching experiences in Australia, Romania, and Albania on such topics as genocide and ethnicity studies as well as Romani and the Holocaust. For her Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr. Woodcock conducted research for her project, “Romanian Legislation, Police and Actions for the Deportation and Persecution of Romanian Roma in Historical, Regional, and Ethnic Context, 1937-1946.”

Dr. Woodcock is the recipient of fellowships and awards due to her academic achievements. She received a Visiting Faculty Fellowship award from the Open Society Institute at the University of Tirana, where she taught for two years. For her paper “How Romania ‘Returns to Europe:’ The Tigan Ethnic Other and the Pardadox of European Performance,” the Association for the Study of Nationalities granted the 2005 Best Paper on Central Europe Award to Dr. Woodcock. In addition to organizing several conferences and seminars, she has published, “The Absence of Albanian Jokes about Socialism, or Why Some Dictatorships are Not Funny,” in Caroline Hamilton, Will Noonan, and Michelle Kelly, eds., The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007); and “Romanian Women’s Discourses of Sexual Violence: Other Ethnicities and Gendering Spaces” in Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, eds. Living Gender after Communism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Center, Dr. Woodcock researched the persecution of Romanian Romani peoples in the Holocaust. She examined the nature of anti-Tiganism in regional and historical context and in comparison with anti-Semitism of the period in Romania. Of particular interest to Dr. Woodcock were the Romani voices in the institutional archives held by the Museum. She capitalized upon the Museum’s extensive resources to conduct her research.

Dr. Woodcock was in residence at the Mandel Center from September 1, 2006 to January 26, 2007.