Faculty Seminar
New Directions in Study of the Holocaust:
An Interdisciplinary Exploration
Please join your colleagues in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discuss this very intriguing and interesting topic with one of our nation’s experts and scholars. Whether for research and/or personal interest, you will walk away with a wealth of knowledge and new insight.
Seminar Registration is closed
Dr. Kenneth Waltzer, the 2011-12 Winegarden Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, will lead and direct the discussions.
The Faculty Seminar comprises 9 meetings over 11 weeks, beginning January 17 and concluding March 27. All books will be supplied by the Winegarden Professorship.
Seminar meeting will be held on Tuesdays in the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching Conference Room (241 French Hall). Dinner will be provided at each seminar beginning at 5:30 p.m., with each session being held from 6 to 8 p.m.
For more information visit my blog, "New Directions in Study of the Holocaust." There the books to be read in the faculty seminar are explored and described, and there are links to reviews of all the books.
We are at turning point in the study of the Holocaust.
The survivors are disappearing. The Holocaust has captured enormous public attention, new archives have opened, and survivor testimonies have been collected. At the same time “Holocaust” language and rhetoric has been widely appropriated beyond the Nazi destruction of the Jews, and the event has become a kind of moral limit event denoting extreme good and evil.
Some think that we are at a challenging but creative juncture, where new ways of knowing and studying about the Holocaust are opening. Others worry that the more attention we pay to the Holocaust, the closer we approach to an “end of the Holocaust.” They fear we may losing clarity about a set of events known in its specificity and carrying a sense of the huge weight and special scandal that should accompany it.
The Faculty Seminar explores four new works that permit us to sample and enter into the rich, interdisciplinary conversations now occurring about where the study of the Holocaust is going and with what effects. History, literary studies, communication, and media coverage as we consider such questions as: Does the proliferation of the popular media depictions diminish the events of the Holocaust? How does the literariness of all memoirs, including those that pose as documents, affect our understanding of the past? Can the Holocaust be understood in the context of several genocides that convulsed a continent? As a product of the conflict between warring tyrannies in the 20th century? What is the value of survivor testimony in Holocaust history, indeed any history that utilize them? Why do some scholars steer away while others embrace them?
The Seminar has concluded, here are some photos from the seminar.
Participants included: Dauda Abubakar, Clara Blakely, Julie Colish, Crystal Flynn, Jennifer Hogan, Peggy Kahn, Elizabeth Kattner-Ulrich, Marsha Lesley, Adam Lutzker, Derwin Munroe, Emily Newberry, Catherine O’Connor, Hisyar Ozsoy, Teddy Robertson, Judy Rosenthal, Maureen Tippin, D. J. Trela and Thomas Wrobel. All of the participants were not available for the group picture.