Ms. Jacquelyn “Jackie” Olson

Professional Background

Jacquelyn “Jackie” Olson is a doctoral student of history at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Germany and Austria and themes of memory, death, and cemeteries. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in history and German from Vanderbilt University. Olson is a graduate research assistant for a spatial narratives project using Holocaust testimonies funded by the National Science Foundation. Before attending Stanford, she worked in two Austrian high schools as an English Teaching Assistant on an Austrian Fulbright Grant. While in Vienna, she interned and worked at Centropa, the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, as a scriptwriter for a Kindertransport podcast project.

Over the last three years, Olson has visited several archives in the United States and Europe, including the archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien), and has visited thirteen Jewish cemeteries in Austria, where she interviewed cemetery-keepers about survivors and relatives returning to the spaces.

Fellowship Research

During her time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow, Olson will be working on her research project, "Whose Dead Are They?: The Agency of Living Jewish Relatives on Memory Policy in Austria and Germany." This project investigates how German and Austrian Jews returned to their cemeteries and, in doing so, altered the local population's relationship to the spaces in the immediate postwar, 1945-1965. Olson will work with archival collections copied from the Jewish community of Vienna, and will focus on the community's correspondence with survivors and cemetery records.

Olson is also interested in how local rabbinical authorities decided on reburial when it was unclear if mass grave remains were Jewish, Romani/Sinti, or neither and how that influenced mourning or inflicted trauma among the local population.

Residency Period: June 1, 2023–August 31, 2023