Anika Walke, the Georgie W. Lewis Career Development Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a senior fellowship in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie FRIAS COFUND Program.
The program is jointly sponsored by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the international research college of the University of Freiburg in Germany, and by the European Union, as part of a larger group of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Designed to promote interdisciplinary research and collaborations, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions are among Europe’s most competitive and prestigious research and innovation fellowships.
Walke — also an associate professor in the departments of history; women, gender and sexuality studies; Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies; and global studies, all in Arts & Sciences — is the author of “Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia,” which analyzes how the first generation of Soviet Jews experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it in a context of social change.
While at the Freiburg Institute — a German analog to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., or the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard — Walke will work on a new book project exploring the legacies of the Holocaust and systematic violence during the German occupation of Belarus, 1941-44. Drawing on a range of sources, the project will offer a novel approach to understanding the Belarusian culture of memory and how revisionist historical accounts are weaponized for political gain in Belarus and elsewhere.
