The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania

Natalia Sineaeva-Pankowska studied Media at Moldova State University and Sociology at the Center for Social Studies and Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw, Poland. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology.

Her PhD dissertation deals with the Holocaust distortion and trivialisation and its interconnectedness with national identity building processes in Moldova. The methodological approach used in the study is mostly the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), applied to the primary sources: public and academic discourses, politicians’ speeches, news reports and newspaper fora, high school history textbooks and museum exhibitions. Her study attempts to assess several interacting, sometimes competing versions of identity (three main ideal types: Pan-Romanian, pan-Soviet/Slavic and Moldovenist). She analyzes how they influence social life and politics in the context of nation building and memory.

In the framework of her EHRI fellowship, among others, she is going to develop the part of her dissertation which assesses in-depth the impact of the Romanian deniers on Moldovan ones as well as to study their connections with international deniers and to see which international denial arguments are being used by homegrown negationists and to what extent. She is going to work with the documents and materials available at the Elie Wiesel Institute (and to use library and other related institutions' resources recommended by the Institute staff) as well as to use the possibilities to receive advice and academic support from the Institute's staff.

Natalia has worked at the Education Department of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Warsaw-based 'NEVER AGAIN' Association, which deals with the commemoration of the Holocaust and other genocides as well as contemporary issues of diversity and tolerance. She has also cooperated as a monitor and a researcher with the Kantor Center for Study of Contemporary European Jewry of Tel-Aviv University. She has written widely for numerous academic and non-academic publications including "The Holocaust. Studies and Materials" of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, “Midrasz”, "Słowo Żydowskie/Dos Jidisze Wort" (Warsaw), "Kyiv Post" (Kiev) and "Evrejskaya Gazeta" (Berlin).