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Research Workshop Program

The Social Worlds of Internment: Entangled Histories of Inmates in Concentration Camps (1933–1945)

Jacob and Yetta Gelman International Research Workshop

August 3–14, 2026 Application deadline: January 12, 2026

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum invites applications for the 2026 Jacob and Yetta Gelman International Research Workshop The Social Worlds of Internment: Entangled Histories of Inmates in Concentration Camps (1933–1945). The Mandel Center will co-convene this workshop with Željka Oparnica and Milovan Pisarri, University of Belgrade, in cooperation with ShoahLab – Holocaust Studies Laboratory at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade. The workshop is scheduled for August 3–14, 2026, and will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This workshop explores the complex lifeworlds of inmates in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and its allies, examining interpersonal and social relations among individuals and groups of different backgrounds as they navigated the often volatile and violent conditions of their incarceration. The fundamental question of how prisoners related to one another—through contact, collaboration, or conflict—remains largely unexplored, leaving a striking gap in our understanding of camp life as a shared, entangled experience. By foregrounding their interactions, the workshop seeks to reconceptualize the study of internment, contributing to a more inclusive, nuanced, and historicized understanding of life in the camps.

Across Europe, its colonies, and semi-colonial territories, concentration, labor, and extermination camps imprisoned remarkably diverse populations. The Nazi camp system interned individuals marked by an array of designations, among them Jews and Roma targeted for racial reasons, political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, men imprisoned for homosexuality, those deemed “asocial,” convicted criminals, and Soviet prisoners of war—categories that multiplied and evolved as the camp system expanded and as allied regimes pursued their own persecutory agendas. At Jasenovac, Roma, Serbs, and Jews lived and died alongside one another. Internment camps in southern France held Spanish Civil War refugees with Jewish refugees and prisoners of war, while French colonial camps in Africa—such as Bedeau, Djelfa, and Ain El Ourak—confined political prisoners, Jews, foreign refugees, and even downed Allied airmen. These shared yet stratified carceral spaces fostered unprecedented encounters among people from vastly different backgrounds under conditions of extreme duress.

While scholarship has thoroughly examined the individual groups incarcerated as ​biological, racial, social, political, and ideological threats, few studies have addressed the lived experiences and interactions among these groups within mixed camps. Building on the foundational work of Sofsky (1993), Helm (2014), and Wachsmann (2015), which illuminates camp structures, inmate hierarchies, and power relations, this workshop will focus on the dynamics of contact, exchange, solidarity, and conflict among different imprisoned populations.

Together, we will ask how prisoners from different backgrounds interacted under extreme conditions, and what forces shaped the nature of their interactions. In what ways were racial, national, political, or other officially imposed categories either reinforced or subverted in the daily life of the camp? What new solidarities or fractures emerged within these enforced proximities? And more fundamentally, how might we move beyond comparative frameworks to embrace a relational or entangled history of camp life—one that highlights contact zones and the fluid boundaries of identity under persecution?

We invite applications that address these questions in studies of individual camps across the European continent and in colonial and semi-colonial territories, or through comparative studies of multiple camps, between 1933 and 1945. The workshop will lay the groundwork for future collaborative research ventures on the relational dimensions of the experience of internment during the Nazi period.

Museum Resources

The Museum's David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation houses an unparalleled repository of Holocaust evidence that documents the fate of victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others. The Museum’s comprehensive collection contains millions of documents, artifacts, photos, films, books, and testimonies. The Museum’s Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names contains records on people persecuted during World War II under the Nazi regime. In addition, the Museum possesses the holdings of the International Tracing Service (ITS), which contains more than 200 million digital images of documentation on millions of victims of Nazism—people arrested, deported, killed, put to forced labor and slave labor, or displaced from their homes and unable to return at the end of the war. Many of these records have not been examined by scholars, offering unprecedented opportunities to advance the field of Holocaust and genocide studies.

The Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945 provides comprehensive documentation of camps, ghettos, and other persecutory sites that the Nazi regime and its allies operated in a vast network spanning from Norway in the North to North Africa in the South, and from France in the West to the Soviet Union in the East. The first four volumes of the Encyclopedia are available as an open access, fully searchable, digital publication hosted by Project Muse, allowing users to dynamically engage with this empirically grounded prodigious resource of thousands of Nazi-operated camps, ghettos, and other sites of persecution like never before. This resource includes an interactive map of sites of internment.

The Museum’s related collections include:

Participants will have access to both the Museum’s downtown campus and the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center in Bowie, MD. To search the Museum's collections, please visit collections.ushmm.org/search.

To Apply

Applications are welcome from scholars affiliated with universities, research institutions, or memorial sites and in any relevant academic discipline, including but not limited to anthropology, history, Jewish studies, literature, philosophy, political science, religion, Romani studies, and sociology. Applications are encouraged from scholars at all levels of their careers, from Ph.D. candidates to senior faculty. 

The Mandel Center will reimburse the costs of round-trip economy-class air tickets to/from the Washington, D.C. metro area, and related incidental expenses, up to a maximum reimbursable amount calculated by home institution location, which will be distributed within 6–8 weeks of the workshop’s conclusion. The Mandel Center will also provide hotel accommodation for the duration of the workshop. Participants are required to attend the full duration of the workshop and to circulate a draft paper in advance of the program.

The deadline for receipt of applications is January 12, 2026.  Applications must include:

  • A short biography

  • A curriculum vitae

  • A list of any related publications and/or on-going research projects

  • An abstract of no more than 500 words outlining the specific project that the applicant is prepared to present during the program.

Applications must be submitted in English via our online application.

APPLY HERE

Questions should be directed to researchworkshops@ushmm.org.

This workshop has been made possible through the generosity of the Jacob and Yetta Gelman Endowment at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.