Dr. Alana Holland

Professional Background

Dr. Alana Holland received her PhD in History from the University of Kansas (United States), as well as a Master’s degree in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (United States). She is the author of the publication, “Soviet Holocaust Retribution in Lithuania, 1944-64,” which appeared in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review in February 2019. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright research award, as well as a Title VIII American Councils fellowship. A native speaker of English, she has language skills in Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Yiddish, and Ukrainian.

As the American University and Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Holland will conduct research for her book project, “The Art of Retribution: Holocaust Memory and Justice in People’s Poland and Soviet Lithuania, 1944-69.” In conjunction with the History and Jewish Studies departments at American University, Dr. Holland will also teach courses on the Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies as a Postdoctoral Fellow at AU.

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Mandel Center, Dr. Holland will draw upon Museum records on war crimes trials pertaining to Poland and the former USSR, as well as the Museum’s substantial collection of oral histories, to conduct research on Holocaust justice and memory behind the Iron Curtain in various artistic and legal settings. She will demonstrate how, regardless of high politics in the ebbs and flows of Cold War, communist states in Europe engaged the concept of personal participation in violence during the Holocaust. By comparing artistic responses to the Holocaust with legal trials against perpetrators in Poland and Lithuania, Dr. Holland explores postwar reckoning with genocide in the spaces where much of the Holocaust occurred. In addition to this research, Dr. Holland will also use Museum collections in comparison with records from the Lithuanian Central State Archives for her article project on the 1934-37 treason trial in Kaunas against German and Lithuanian Nazi conspirators. In her work she seeks to demonstrate the ways in which past societies have interpreted extant domestic laws to account for race-based policies and crimes.

Residency Period: August 1, 2020, through July 31, 2021