“Eyes on the Ground: Soviet Investigations of the Nazi Occupation.”
Professional Background
Paula Chan is a PhD Candidate in Russian and Eastern European History at Georgetown University. As the Robert A. Savitt Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Chan will be conducting research for her project, “Eyes on the Ground: Soviet Investigations of the Nazi Occupation.”
Ms. Chan holds both a master’s degree in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University (2015), and a master's in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute in New York, NY (2011). Before coming to Georgetown, she previously worked as an archivist, research assistant, and cataloger of rare books. Ms. Chan is the recipient of several awards, most recently the Jacques Rossi Gulag Research Fund Award (2017) and the Davis Graduate Student Travel Grant (2018).
Ms. Chan is a native English speaker, and has advanced language skills in both Russian and French.
Fellowship Research
While in residence at the Mandel Center, Ms. Chan seeks to examine how the Soviet Union gathered, shaped, and presented information about the persecution of Jews during the Nazi occupation. Her work focuses on local auxiliaries of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic region, analyzing the transmission and dissemination of information as interactive processes, during which local and central Soviet actors shaped knowledge about the Holocaust in response to outside forces such as Western skepticism. Ms. Chan's project relies on the Museum's memoir and oral history collections to juxtapose Jewish witness statements given to commission representatives with these same survivors' testimonies preserved in non-Soviet sources.
Ms. Chan will be in residence through May 31, 2019, and can be contacted at her museum e-mail pchan@ushmm.org.