Undergraduate Research: Children and Mass Violence

Political science and anthropology senior Jasmine Angelini-Knoll is interested in how children process trauma—an interest that drives her current research on the comparative experiences of child survivors of mass violence.

She is studying the memoirs of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust as children and Sudanese "Lost Boys" who survived genocide in Sudan to determine the similarities and differences between the experiences and how they have been expressed in narrative form.

Angelini-Knoll's faculty mentor is Kenneth Waltzer, professor in James Madison College and director of the Jewish Studies Program. Her project grew from time spent helping Waltzer translate Holocaust survivor testimonies for a book he is writing about a group of young boys who survived Buchenwald, the notorious Nazi concentration camp.

Angelini-Knoll had been reading Dave Eggers's "What Is the What," a fictionalized memoir based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a child refugee from the Sudanese civil war. Exposure to the Buchenwald memoirs and a background in Holocaust history led her to notice similarities between the two groups.

"There are similarities not only in how children experience this level of atrocity and mass violence, but also in the ways that their stories get told, the way they are set up, the way they start and move to the end and what kinds of things get left out," Angelini-Knoll said.

"One of the main differences underlying each set of narratives is the implied purpose of the memoir—the Buchenwald boys are writing at a greater distance from their experiences in order to add to the historical record of the Holocaust, whereas the Lost Boys of Sudan are motivated to educate the public about an ongoing, current conflict.

"In addition, the experiences of being refugees (Sudan) versus prisoners and slave laborers (Buchenwald) create different traumatic memories and different modes of survival for each group of boys."

Angelini-Knoll's research won a first-place award at the 2007 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum; last spring she was one of two students invited to present their projects to the MSU Board of Trustees.

 

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