“Imaging the War: Visual Representations on the Soviet-German Front, 1941-1945"
Professional Background
Marilyn Campeau is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in modern European and Russian history at the History Department and the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto (Canada). She earned an M.A. in modern Russian history and a B.A in linguistics and history from University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada). As the Joyce and Arthur Schechter Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Campeau will conduct research for her dissertation, “Imaging the War: Visual Representations on the Soviet-German Front, 1941-1945.”
Ms. Campeau is fluent in French and English, and has good knowledge of Russian, German, and Spanish.
Ms. Campeau is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Sonshine Graduate Award in Holocaust Studies, the Granovsky-Gluskin Graduate Scholarship in Jewish Studies, and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) at both the doctoral and master levels.
In recent years, Ms. Campeau has presented her work at the Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She has also participated in various conferences and workshops that address Jewish studies, the history of everyday life, war and violence, propaganda as a mean of indoctrination, gender history, and visual culture, including the Holocaust Education Foundation’s 21st annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University. In 2017, she presented her paper, “Drawing the War: Soviet Jewish Frontline Artists during the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945,” at the Schwartz-Reisman Graduate Student Conference in Jewish Studies. Between 2013 and 2017, she also published several articles in French related to her master's thesis research, which analyzed Soviet soldiers’ personal wartime correspondence. She is currently drafting a book chapter for an edited volume for future publication and other articles.
Fellowship Research
Drawing on the museum’s resources and art history techniques, Ms. Campeau will research the visual experiences of Soviet soldiers who fought on the Soviet-German front during World War II. Her work examines the goals and motivations of the artists and how Soviet propaganda shaped their worldview. She compares Soviet artists’ portrayals of frontline life with state-sponsored propaganda.
Ms. Campeau will be in residence through August 31, 2019 and can be contacted at her museum email mcampeau@ushmm.org.