Rachelle Gloudemans is a PhD candidate in contemporary Italian literature at KU Leuven. Previously, she obtained an MA in Italian literature and culture, and an MRes in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral research project, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), zooms in on the constructions of transcultural memories and identities in the works written in Italian by translingual Jewish authors who migrated to Italy from various regions in Europe and the Middle-East since the 1940’s.

The EHRI Kristel fellowship at CDEC takes places in the context of the doctoral research project. During the fellowship, Rachelle will elaborate the analysis of the diverse connections and intersections between migration narratives and personal and collective memories of the Shoah. In particular, she will consult archival units relating to Jewish migrations to Italy in the second half of the twentieth century, in order to contextualize the trajectories of travelling (post-)memories of the Shoah that emerge from the project corpus, as well as to further map the intersections and divergences between these memories and the local memorial landscape.