A public lecture by Christine Liu (PhD candidate in History, University of Maine)
2025-2026 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Cosponsored by the USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute

(Join us in person or online on Zoom)

Facing massive overcrowding and scant resources, Jews imprisoned in Holocaust ghettos faced life-threatening hunger. This sustained deprivation dominated the physiological and psychological state of incarcerated Jews, reconfiguring perceptions of space. In this talk, Christine Liu (PhD candidate in History) discusses how Holocaust survivors describe memories of starvation, the places they associate with such moments, their bodies and others' bodies, and what these accounts reveal about how hunger fundamentally defined experiences of the ghettos where starvation conditions transformed social relations, territoriality, and space.

Read more about the lecture here.

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Lunch will be served.

Christine Liu is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Maine. Her dissertation, currently entitled “‘No place to go, no place to sleep, no place to eat’: Reimagining hunger in Holocaust ghettos in German-occupied Poland through spatial analysis” looks at experiences of Holocaust ghettos as inherently defined by hunger. It analyzes how starvation conditions destabilized conceptions of traditional gender roles, actions undertaken in pursuit of survival, and the permeability of boundaries. Liu holds a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Computational Media from Duke University. Her research has been funded by grants from Duke University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Read more here.