“Melodrama and Memory: Historicizing Pathos in American, British and Czechoslovak Postwar Holocaust Films”
Professional Background
Rachel Schaff is currently PhD Candidate at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MA in Film Studies from Columbia University. As the Margit Meissner Fellow for the Study of the Holocaust in Czech Lands, Ms. Schaff will be conducting research for her project entitled “Melodrama and Memory: Historicizing Pathos in American, British and Czechoslovak Postwar Holocaust Films.”
Ms. Schaff has reading and speaking abilities in Czech.
Ms. Schaff is the author of “The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame” in Cinema et Cie International Film Studies Journal (2016) and is co-author of “Documentary: The Archival Double” in Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism [with Jane Gaines] (2013). She is the winner of multiple grants and fellowships, the most recent being the Fulbright I.I.E. Student Research Fellowship for 2015-2016.
Fellowship Research
While in residence at the Mandel Center, Ms. Schaff researched how films made about the Holocaust soon after the war produced a particular type of sentiment to reflect the innermost subjectivity of the nation, and, in doing so, effectively reframed the Holocaust as part of a national experience within the parameters of the distinctive postwar nation-building projects within America, Britain and Czechoslovakia. She will use the museums various collections to further this work, especially the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.
Ms. Schaff was in residence until September 30, 2017.