Professional Background
Alexandra Natoli is an assistant professor of French and Director of Global Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. She received her PhD in French from the University of Virginia. Her doctoral dissertation, “Muscle Memory: Rethinking the Scatological in French Visions of Deportation,” analyzed French survivors’ complex foregrounding of their relationship to excreta and the reappropriation of this emphasis in a broader corpus of French Holocaust fiction.
Dr. Natoli is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2019 J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellowship at the Mandel Center. During her fellowship she began research for her current monograph project exploring the rich and surprising ways survivors evoke latrine spaces in both written and oral testimony. An abridged version of this research appears in special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research (Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung). In 2024, she was honored to be selected as an inaugural cohort member for two United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Broadening Academia Initiative programs: the Virtual Writing Group and the Writing Retreat. In addition to her focus on latrines, Dr. Natoli’s current research explores the intersections of visual culture and Holocaust memory in photography and Francophone comics.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. Natoli will continue researching and writing on her book project, “The ‘Heart’ of Auschwitz”: Memories of a Death Camp Latrine. Too frequently misunderstood or ignored, latrine spaces occupied key roles in the daily lived experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Although their only official use was for voiding waste, latrines served unofficial yet vital functions in camp life. Survivors of all genders and nationalities remember latrines not only as loci of filth and abasement, but also as hubs of community, commerce, and even shelter. Through a vibrant kaleidoscope of testimonies, latrines emerge as volatile, unpredictable sites which could both help and hinder daily survival. This project seeks to reunite the conflicted, often surprising memories bound to these sites, contemplating the paradoxes that latrines could incarnate for survivors. Using an interdisciplinary approach that foregrounds survivor voices, this project proposes a unique lens through which to view survivor experiences and memories of Auschwitz-Birkenau by engaging with one of the camp’s most crucial yet overlooked spaces. This hybrid fellowship facilitates Dr. Natoli’s access to the Museum’s vast survivor testimony holdings as well as to myriad sources from the Museum’s photographic collections.
Fellowship Period: November 1, 2025 – April 30, 2026