Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, USC School of Cinematic Arts and a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities.  Her research interests include cinematic representations of the Holocaust; national and transnational modes and media of memorialization; digital humanities; politics of technologized memory; place and space in cinema; history as film/film as history; and political economy of film. Her dissertation project, “#Holocaust: Rethinking the Relationship Between Spaces of Memory and Places of Commemoration In The Digital Age,” focuses on the relationship between interactivity, visual studies, and Holocaust memory. Some of the main questions that motivate her doctoral research are: What is the future of Holocaust history and memory? How do new developments in digital media and humanities alter our dealing with the existential question of forever-lost witnesses? How do national and transnational modes of memorialization affect the direction of Holocaust memory at a national, regional, and global scale? 

Maria is also a member of the USC Visual Studies Graduate Certificate program. In 2015 and 2016, she has served as a member of the Peabody Awards screening committee (Documentary Film category). In 2011, she received a Graduate Student Award for Distinguished Achievement for her M.A. thesis, “History, Film, and Politics of Cultural Memory in Post-1989 East-Central Europe” and the Edward B. Kaufman Fellowship for Humanities (SFSU). After graduating from the University of Oxford, she worked for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, an organization which raises funds to preserve the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum.