July 13–24, 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 Moskowitz/Rafalowicz International Research Workshop Romani Responses to Persecution: Transnational Histories of Repression and Resistance (1850–1950). The Mandel Center will co-convene this workshop with Adrian-Nicolae Furtună, Romanian Academy and National Centre of Roma Culture, and Verena Meier, Research Center on Antigypsyism at the University of Heidelberg. The workshop is scheduled for July 13–24, 2026, and will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This workshop investigates the longue durée of the persecution of Romani people from 1850 to 1950, a century anchored by the emancipation of Roma from enslavement in the Romanian principalities and culminating in the genocidal violence of the Holocaust. This period, marked by the upheavals of World War I and the collapse of empires, saw the rise of racial science and eugenics, the consolidation of modern state apparatuses of surveillance and control, intensified border regulation, and the emergence of international policing networks—developments that fundamentally transformed the trajectory of anti-Roma persecution. Applying the paradigms of both integrated and entangled history, this workshop seeks to illuminate the transnational evolution of state repression and Romani agency across time periods and political contexts. It also contributes to a history of the Holocaust as—in Michael Wildt’s terms—an event in which the violence directed at Jews, Roma, people with disabilities and others was “complex, intertwined, and mutually radicalizing,” fully intelligible only when studied as a shared and relational history of violence.
Across Europe in this period, Romani people were systematically racialized, criminalized, and excluded through legal frameworks, policing practices, and academic discourses that legitimated their oppression. The dissemination and intensification of these policies and practices was often galvanized by transnational exchanges: biopolitical, eugenic, and “criminal biological” theories circulated widely in European and North American academies, and surveillance techniques such as fingerprinting and registration were shared at international conferences. These connections were pivotal in shaping patterns of persecution and the mechanisms of genocide of Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust. The transfer of personnel, knowledge, and practices within the Nazi sphere of influence further radicalized violence across Europe with the outbreak of the war. In turn, the eugenic and racialized discourses and practices that underpinned this persecution—rooted in the prewar period—continued to marginalize survivors and their descendants long after 1945, as state institutions re-hired eugenicists, police officers, and other perpetrators and histories of the period obscured their crimes.
Throughout, Romani communities developed diverse strategies of survival and resistance that transcended national borders and contested their racialization. Economic adaptation through niche occupations and crafts enabled everyday survival, while strategic mobility, both within states and across their borders, served to evade persecution and to build local, regional and transnational networks of mutual aid, information exchange, and solidarity. The practice of petitioning authorities—ranging from requests for trade licenses to appeals against deportation or internment—can be found across different political, social, and economic systems throughout the mid-19th and 20th centuries and represents a particularly underexplored form of agency. Examined transnationally, these petitions reveal how Romani people navigated multiple state bureaucracies, deployed legal arguments to challenge their categorization as racially inferior or inherently criminal, and asserted claims to identity, citizenship, economic rights, and legal protection across different national contexts.
We invite submissions that analyze these developments and their transnational dimensions with attention to both the mechanisms of repression and the varied Romani responses they provoked, along the following lines of inquiry:
Histories of repression that integrate the perspectives of police, local, officials, scientists, bystanders, and the persecuted
The transnational transfer of ideas, personnel, and practices that linked national and regional systems of repression
The development, adaptation, and circulation of racial theories, eugenics, surveillance methods, and legal frameworks across borders
Romani strategies of survival, adaptation, and cross-border solidarity
The use of petitions to navigate state bureaucracies and legal systems
Strategic mobility across borders as means of evasion and survival
The intensification and radicalization of persecution during World War II and its culmination in genocidal violence
The interconnected persecution of Roma, Jews, people with disabilities, and other targeted groups
We welcome applications from across regions and time periods that explore transnational dynamics through border and migration studies, comparative analyses, or the circulation of ideas and practices. We especially encourage interdisciplinary perspectives, intersectional analyses of gender and class, studies that consider the role of memory, and approaches that bring methodological innovation to the study of persecution and resistance. Scholars from underrepresented backgrounds in the field of Holocaust studies or whose work draws on Romany-language sources are particularly encouraged to apply.
Daily sessions of the workshop will consist of presentations and roundtable discussions led by participants, as well as discussions with Museum staff and research in the Museum’s collections. The workshop will be conducted in English.
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 related collections include:
A number of collections from various countries of government documents pertaining to the persecution and murder of Roma, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Romania, the Russian Federation
Records documenting the deportation of Romanian Roma to Transnistria
Records relating to internment and transit camps for Roma and Sinti (Zigeunerlager) in the 1930s and ‘40s in Austria, the Czech Lands, France, Germany, and Slovakia
Photos and other records of racial investigations of Roma and Sinti conducted in Austria, Germany, and Poland
A number of small and mid-size personal collections of letters, memoirs, photos, and personal documents, such as the Winterstein-Reinhardt family collections, Safta Marin’s memoir, Jan Istvan’s memoir, and Karl Stojka's memoir, among others
Oral histories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, including the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, and the Yahad-in Unum oral history collection
Photos of pre-war Romani life
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, ethnomusicology, history, literature, philosophy, political science, 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 co-organizers anticipate developing a special journal issue based on the workshop papers.
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.
Questions should be directed to researchworkshops@ushmm.org.
This workshop has been made possible through the generosity of the Moskowitz/Rafalowicz Endowment at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.