Chiara Renzo graduated (BA+MA) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) from the Department of African and Asian Studies, with majors in Hebrew Language, Literature and Culture. She was awarded the “Placidia Coen Memory Award” for her MA thesis on the social history of four displaced persons (DP) camps in Southern Italy, which hosted between 1943 and 1947 almost exclusively non-Italian Jewish refugees.

Currently, Chiara Renzo is a Ph.D candidate in History at the joint doctoral program of the Universities of Florence and Siena. Her dissertation focuses, on the one hand, on the relief and rehabilitation policies adopted by the rescue agencies which provided assistance to the Jewish DPs and, on the other hand, on the activism of the Jewish DPs themselves in order to make aliyah.

Chiara Renzo spent the second year (2015) of her Ph.D program in Jerusalem, where she was Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University and at the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research.

During her tenure at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide (London), Chiara will continue to work on her Ph.D project exploring the available documentation produced both by the Jewish DPs and the Jewish organizations involved in the post-war refugees’ assistance in Italy.