Student Profile:
Abigail Lewis, '12
Published: Spring 2012
Honors Thesis Inspires History Student to Pursue Holocaust Studies
Although many undergraduates begin their
college careers with an idea of their future, many
completely change plans during their course of
study. Not so with Abigail (Abby) Lewis, ’12. “Ever since high school,” she says, “I knew I
wanted to study history.”
For the senior from Apex, North Carolina,
UNC has presented her with many opportunities
to pursue her ambitions of higher study in history.
Early on at Carolina, she increasingly came to
concentrate her studies on the history of the
Holocaust. “I took a class on analyzing camp and
gulag memoirs and then gravitated towards that
field of study.” Currently a senior honors student
in the Department of History, Lewis has gone on
to take numerous upper level and even graduate
level courses in history, in addition to learning
German and French.
This past summer, she had the chance to use
these language skills when she conducted research
in Paris for her honors thesis, which she found
exhilarating.
“It was fun to sit down in a French library and
read original French documents. That’s fun for me.
Maybe that’s nerdy, but hanging out in libraries in
Paris for a job sounds awesome to me.” She added,“I guess I have a thing for libraries.”
During fall semester, she received a Carolina
Center for Jewish Studies Undergraduate
Research Grant to conduct additional research
utilizing the Fortunoff Video Archive of survivor
testimonies, which is housed at Yale University. “Without the Center’s funding, my project would
primarily be reading published memoirs and
watching interviews available at UNC, but thanks
to this funding, I have had access to a greater
breadth of resources and I will have a more well rounded
project.”
Focusing on French survivor accounts, Lewis’
research explores Jewish identity in Europe in the
wake of the Holocaust. She is also interested in
the ways memories of survival change over time.“What people say in 1946 versus what they say
in 1970 reveals a great deal about the way their
own thinking about survival and about witnessing
changes over time.”
Lewis will present her research at an honors
symposium in the spring, and she intends to convert
the thesis into an article for an undergraduate
journal. The thesis represents the capstone of a
four-year program of intensive historical studies.
She will attend graduate school in the fall to
pursue a Ph.D. in Jewish History.
