History Graduate Student Awarded Assistantship at Holocaust Museum

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Stuart Bailey

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Stuart Bailey, a graduate student in the department of history, has been selected for the nationally competitive Summer Graduate Research Assistant Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He will spend the summer of 2014 working in the museum archives and assisting postdoctoral fellows with a conference on forced labor in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

Bailey’s research deals with the history of production and consumption in twentieth-century Germany, with an emphasis on the development of the automobile industry. He is a first-year master’s student working with J. Laurence Hare, assistant professor of modern European history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

“Stuart’s remarkable accomplishment in earning this opportunity with the USHMM not only speaks to his enormous potential as a future scholar, but also says something more generally about what graduate students at Arkansas can achieve,” Hare said.

Before beginning his graduate studies, Bailey was an honors scholar majoring in history and German at the University of Arkansas.  His honors thesis, “The Road to Fahrvergnügen: The Development of Car Culture in Postwar Germany,” was supported by a Statewide Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the Arkansas Department of Education. 

“Since Stuart started his research with an Arkansas SURF grant, it reminds us of the long-term benefits that we derive from supporting young researchers during their undergraduate years,” Hare said.

The Summer Graduate Research Assistant Program is designed for students accepted to or currently enrolled in a master’s degree program or in their first year of a doctoral program. The experience acquaints promising students with Holocaust studies by encouraging participation in the broad range of scholarly and publicly available educational programs offered by the museum during the summer months.