Biography

Alison B. Curry is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she works with Dr. Karen Auerbach. Previously, she received her M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College, advised by Dr. Michael Steinlauf, and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University.

Curry’s dissertation, tentatively titled “In the Space of the Dead: Tradition, Identity, and Everyday Life in the Jewish Cemeteries of Poland, 1918-1945,” examines the ritual, spatial, and functional uses of Jewish cemeteries in Poland during the interwar period and through the Second World War. Through examination of Jewish communal records, state and municipal records, testimonies, oral histories, yizkor books, and memoirs this project argues that during these time periods cemeteries served a central space through which Jewish identity was contested and enforced. Curry’s dissertation explores how Jewish cemeteries were central spaces of conflict between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, and served as a boundary between the world of the living and the dead. By examining such spaces over the period of the interwar and the Second World War, this dissertation suggests that scholarly assessment of the two periods can be accomplished together, and such comparative assessment allows historians to make better sense of continuities and divides in Jewish history.

While a graduate student at UNC, Curry has received many fellowships and awards. Her research has been supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Curry was also recently awarded the Christopher Browning Student Excellence Award in Jewish Studies from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Currently, she is an Association for Jewish Studies’ Dissertation Completion Fellow for the academic year 2024-2024. 

Curry has participated in many conferences while a doctoral student, including a conference hosted by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland, graduate student conferences hosted by Clark University and Indiana University at Bloomington, and the Lessons And Legacies Conference held in Prague in November 2023. Finally, she also has a publication forthcoming in the Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry journal (anticipated Fall 2024), titled “After Death: Identity, Tradition, and Ethics Surrounding the Dead Jewish Body in Poland.”