Ms. Alexandra M. Szabó

Professional Background

Alexandra M. Szabó is a PhD candidate in history at Brandeis University, researching the experiences of Hungarian Jews and Roma who endured sterilization and castration experiments in National Socialist concentration camps. Ms. Szabó holds two master's degrees: one in literary and cultural studies from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), where she examined the literary representations of changing Jewish identity in Hungarian literature, and another in history from Central European University, where she investigated the return of deported survivors to Hungary from labor and concentration camps after liberation.

Ms. Szabó co-founded and served as a researcher for the interdisciplinary Digital Lens Research Group at ELTE University, which pursues digital research on Holocaust testimonies, focusing particularly on gendered experiences of the Holocaust, topographies of persecution, and language. 

Ms. Szabó has also published research articles, book reviews, and book chapters in Eastern European Holocaust Studies, Cultural History (EUP), The Hungarian Historical Review, and the European Journal of Women’s Studies, among other venues. She has earned numerous fellowships and awards for her research from institutions such as the International Society for Cultural Studies, the Hungarian-American Coalition, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

Fellowship Research

Alexandra M. Szabó was awarded the Randolph and Elizabeth Braham Fellowship to conduct research for her dissertation project, “Prolonged Genocide: Sterilization and Castration Abuse of the Holocaust.” Her work investigates Hungarian Jews’ and Romani peoples’ experiences and the long-term impacts of sterilization and castration experiments that were conducted in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Lackenbach in the years 1942 to 1945. Ms. Szabó’s dissertation work examines involuntary infertility, the several physiological and psychological outcomes, as well as related silences caused by forced sterilization and castration procedures as a distinct kind of “prolonged genocide.”

This fellowship allows Ms. Szabó to use the USHMM's archival collections, where she can follow the life stories of victims through oral and written testimonies and compensation claim documentation that details the postwar repercussions and the medical aspects of victims’ lives even decades after the war.

Residency Period: January 1, 2025–April 30, 2025