Ms. Allison Somogyi

Professional Background

Ms. Allison Somogyi is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She holds a MA in History from the University of North Carolina. As the Alexander Grass Memorial Fellow, at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Somogyi will be conducting research for her study “In the Lion’s Den: Jewish Survival in Budapest under the Arrow Cross Regime (October 1944 – February 1945).”

Ms. Somogyi is proficient in Spanish, Hungarian, and German and has writing and reading skills in Hebrew.

Ms. Somogyi is the winner of several awards and fellowships. She was a Saul Kagan Fellow for Advanced Shoah Studies for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany during both 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 periods. She also received the Two-Week Research Fellowship for PhD Students/Candidates from Abroad at Yad Vashem in 2017. She also received the Jewish Studies Summer Stipend in 2017 and the Graduate Research and Travel Grant from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 2014 and 2015. She also received two summer and one academic year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships from the US Department of Education in 2013 and 2014.

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Mandel Center, Ms. Somogyi initiated research on the study of survival and resistance tactics employed by Budapest’s Jewish community under Nazi occupation, in order to illustrate how Budapest’s Jews navigated the end of the war while still physically integrated in non-Jewish society. Drawing on the Museum's resources, she sought to understand the experiences of living under the chaotic Arrow Cross regime through the eyes of Budapest’s young, Jewish women, how Jews in Budapest maneuvered in the space available to them in order to survive the Final Solution, and the short-lived Arrow Cross Regime.

Ms. Somogyi was in residence from November 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018.