Student’s Studies Deepened by Travel Experience

Denison’s Horizon Fund supports learning experiences for our students.

“My life’s passion is learning about the Holocaust and Jewish Studies,” says Sam McLaughlin ’19. McLaughlin is a double major in English Creative Writing and Art History and Visual Culture. She had been studying Auschwitz Birkenau and the Holocaust for three years before visiting in person. And it was thanks to The Horizon Fund donors that McLaughlin was able to encounter firsthand the places she’d studied in books and art.

McLaughlin is writing a Holocaust-era novel, a project that began as a short story she wrote in high school. At Denison, she conducted summer research around illustrations by a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, photography of Dachau and Buchenwald, and three-dimensional memorials rooted in Holocaust visual culture.

McLaughlin says she was deeply moved by a tour of the Birkenau concentration camp, led by Eva Kor, a survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele’s twin medical experiments. When McLaughlin returned home, she says that she cried a lot. “It was so valuable to go there. Anyone can read a book or watch a movie but going there is hard to put into words.”

“Denison is the college for opportunity,” she says.