A Student's Quest for Holocaust Education

A student in the Master’s in Public History Program, Lily’s professional and academic career focuses on the Holocaust and women’s and gender studies. She discovered her passion for Holocaust education as an undergraduate in Central Arkansas because of the scarcity of historical resources on the subject within the state.

“Seeing the need for that history and for it to be accurate and easily accessible for folks—so that we can use that knowledge not only to understand the past and the experiences of a lot of people but also to understand our present and future—was important to me,” Lily says.

During this time, she began her research on how recipes authored by women in concentration camps, especially Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, fostered community, hope, and resistance within the confines of these camps, despite their harrowing conditions. Some of these recipes, according to Lily, were eventually gathered into family cookbooks, serving as a conduit for passing down culture to future generations.

At Duquesne, Lily has sustained her Holocaust education career. In 2023, she interned with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where she developed databases, crafted data visualizations, and set up reporting guidelines for the Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibition, facilitating informed program decisions and visitor experience assessments.

This year, she has played an instrumental role in organizing the upcoming Holocaust lecture, “Why the Holocaust Still Matters,” with the History Department on Tuesday, March 12th. The event will feature Dr. Michael Berenbaum, one of the world's most distinguished scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism.

As we rapidly enter a world with fewer firsthand survivors, Lily is excited about this event because it will offer the Pittsburgh community a chance to learn about the Holocaust and ask questions, regardless of how much they know about this moment in history.

“I want people to know it’s okay to be curious and seek out information from trusted resources,” she says about the event. “The Holocaust is a really powerful thing that has shaped global history, and it makes sense for us to want to know why and how that happened.”