Biography
Victoria is a third year student majoring in History and REEES with a minor in Art History. Growing up in a Polish family, Victoria has been a student of Polish language, culture, and history at both the high school and collegiate level, and has firmly placed these areas of study as the foundation of her undergraduate career. As a freshman, Victoria participated in the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, creating a research project centering around historical media representations of the Hmong Diaspora in Minnesota, beginning her research journey at the University of Illinois. As a sophomore, Victoria worked as a Collections Intern at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center where she translated simple diary entries from Polish into English. She then turned her experience as a Collections Intern into a short presentation that she delivered at the Jordan Center Undergraduate Research Symposium at New York University. In the fall semester, she studied abroad at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She has since begun her undergraduate thesis focusing on Polish women in rural areas during World War II. Her research interests include the role of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, and contemporary implications of Holocaust education, specifically in Poland.