Dr. Diana Dumitru
Dr. Diana Dumitru is the Ion Ratiu Visiting Professor in Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. A historian of modern Eastern Europe, she specializes in Holocaust studies, Soviet nationality policies, antisemitism, and late Stalinism. She has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the University of Jena, among many others.
Her second book, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press, 2016), offers a comparative study of interethnic violence and state policy before and during the Holocaust. Her latest book, Soviet Jews under Late Stalinism, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is also co-authoring The Slánský Trial: A New History (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), together with Chad Bryant and Kateřina Čapková. Dr. Dumitru serves on the editorial boards of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and the Journal of Genocide Research.
"What I love about Centropa is that it resists the monopoly of historical abstraction. By sitting at kitchen tables and asking elderly Jews to narrate their entire lives – not just their suffering – Centropa gave us a rare archive of 20th-century Jewish experience in its full complexity. In my own book, I drew extensively on Centropa interviews and photographs for the richness and specificity they offer, for the lives they document and the moments they preserve. In the coming years, I hope to see Centropa continue as a bridge between rigorous historical inquiry and public storytelling, expanding how we teach, write, and think about Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe."