Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program

The Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies offers Strauss Fellowships for early-career scholars: ABDs, postdocs and assistant professors (or equivalent professional stage). Made possible through the generosity of Franklin Strauss, MD, these fellowships support scholarship addressing the intersection of healthcare and medicine with the Holocaust, other genocides or mass violence, broadly conceived. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the center, fellowships are open to scholars studying relevant topics through any number of fields. 

We are excited to announce that Yu Wang, PhD (comparative literature), has been selected as the center’s 2023–2024 Strauss Fellow. Dr. Wang is a postdoc at the University Health Network’s Wilson Centre in Toronto and a former postdoc at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current project is titled "Last Pages of Their Story: Aging and Historical Violence in Witness Narratives of World War II." Observing that discussions around elderly survivors’ health and how it impacts their memories of the war have been limited and mainly concerned with dementia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), she explores the broader narrative connection between war and aging by focusing on survivors, combat soldiers and medical professionals of World War II in both the European and Pacific theaters, who recall their wartime experiences through the lens of psychological, physical and social meanings of aging. She argues that these later-life narratives, taken together, facilitate our understanding of witnesses of historical violence as whole people and deepen our empathy with them.