Department of History

Delving into history, memory, and trauma throughout her M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University, through psychoanalytic study, as a 2023 Summer Graduate Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and by 9 Russian-language testimonies from Soviet Holocaust survivors, as a Belarusian native, Vesta has noted that manifold ways of tackling Holocaust and Soviet historical trauma appear to play a role in the democratization of post-Soviet states along the Central Eastern European borderlands. The approaches to trauma in the national identity formation of Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, as well as the evolution of those approaches over the last 30 years, illustrate a movement toward or away from the Russian sphere. A lingering fear permeates Belarusian society: a yoke that maintains the political status quo and the presence of Belarus' dictatorship. Vesta hopes to explore that fear.

Relevant links: United States Holocaust Museum