To honor former Comparative Literature and Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies PhD student, Okla Elliott, who passed away unexpectedly in 2017. After graduating from UIUC, Okla went on to become an Assistant Professor at Misericordia University. After he died, another Comparative Literature Ph.D., Anya Hamrick (now an Assistant Professor at NYIT-Nanjing), began a GoFundMe campaign in order to provide travel funds for graduate students to go to HGMS related conferences or to conduct HGMS relevant research. 

In honor of Okla, HGMS students have been awarded funds to support conference and research travel related to their scholarship on Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. The collected funds have now been dispersed, so we do not anticipate offering any additional awards at this time.