Dr. Alison Curry

Professional Background

Alison Curry received her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, titled “In the Space of the Dead: Tradition, Identity, and Everyday Life in the Jewish Cemeteries of Poland, 1918-1945,” explored the ritual, spatial, and functional uses of Jewish cemeteries in interwar Poland and during the Holocaust. Through examination of the relationship between the living, the dead, and the space in which they are buried, her research contributes to scholarship on survival, resistance, and genocide perpetration. An article based on this research is forthcoming in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.

Dr. Curry also holds a master’s degree in Holocaust and Genocide studies from Gratz College, a graduate certificate in digital public humanities from George Mason University, and bachelor’s degrees in history and anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She has presented her research at many conferences, including those organized by the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, the Association for Jewish Studies, the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland. She has also been invited to share her findings at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the University of Louisville, and Cornell University.

Dr. Curry’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Association for Jewish Studies, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Currently, Dr. Curry works in the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education, developing and researching content for the USHMM’s online Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Broadening Academia Initiative Public History Postdoctoral Fellow, Alison Curry will research the materiality and institutionality of Jewish death during the Holocaust. Expanding upon her dissertation research, these projects will further interrogate the role that Jewish religion, spirituality, and tradition played in the everyday decisions made within various spaces of the Holocaust, including towns, ghettos, cemeteries, and camps.

Residency Period: July 28, 2025 – July 28, 2027