Past Regional Institutes
2023-2024
“Witness: Mediating Holocaust Testimony in the Arts”
Bellingham, Washington; April 17-19, 2024
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) and the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University sponsored the Regional Institute “Witness: Mediating Holocaust Testimony in the Arts” with support from the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Victoria.
This Regional Institute focused on mediation of Holocaust testimony in literature, music, and the visual arts. Institute faculty will explore the transformation of traumatic histories, memories, and stories into multi-layered, polyvalent sites of representation during and after the genocide. Participants analyzed the intersections of autobiography, fiction, graphic novels, memorials, photography, poetry, music, sound, and voice with testimony and provide examples for use in multi-disciplinary, multi-modal and multi-lingual postsecondary classrooms. Teaching faculty included Charlotte Schallié (University of Victoria), award-winning graphic novelist Miriam Libicki (Vancouver, BC), Sandra Alfers (Western Washington University), Kathryn Huether (Vanderbilt University), Helga Thorson (University of Victoria), and Kristin Semmens (University of Victoria). Tabea Linhardt (Washington University in St. Louis) will deliver the keynote.
“Borders/Borderlands and the Holocaust”
Austin, Texas; February 18-19, 2024
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) sponsored the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University-San Antonio Winter 2024 Regional Institute on “Borders/Borderlands and the Holocaust.”
The Holocaust and the destruction of the European Jews was a global event in which migration, war, and mass murder were centered in Europe, but whose effects reached around the world. While the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe were incontrovertibly the central area of violence and mass killing, this institute examined the role of “borders” and “borderlands” in relation to our understanding of the events of the Shoah. While borders are traditionally defined in legal terms as lines that separate or divide nation states, “borderlands” are zones, sometimes around borders, where diverse peoples come together and interact. In this sense, borderlands imply highly contested regions in which the intent of the occupier is met by the actions and agency of the occupied. This regional institute focused on the diverse nature of borderlands (geographical, linguistic, legal, etc.) and the ways in which events in these real and imagined spaces can deepen our understanding of the Shoah. Participants explored questions of boundaries as they relate to identities and belonging, perpetrators, neighbors and victims, Holocaust memory and others.
The Austin Regional Institute offered an opportunity for university-level instructors and museum professionals to expand their knowledge of various aspects of the history, memory, representation, and contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. The Regional Institute included workshops devoted to sexual/gender violence, transnational comparisons of conquest, photography, pedagogy, micro-historical approaches, and postwar/memory culture. The Regional Institute’s organizers were Tatjana Lichtenstein (UT-Austin) and Edward B. Westermann (Texas A&M-San Antonio); teaching faculty included Victoria Aarons (Trinity University), David Crew (UT Austin), Pascale Bos (UT Austin), Jason Johnson (Trinity University) and Adam Seipp (Texas A&M College Station). William Kiser (Texas A&M-San Antonio) delivered the keynote lecture.
2022-2023
“The Year of the Holocaust: Thirty Years Later”
St. Louis, Missouri, April 28-30, 2023
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) sponsored the St. Louis Regional Institute in cooperation with Washington University in St. Louis and the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.
The St. Louis Regional Institute focused on what has changed in Holocaust Studies over the course of recent decades, as we move deeper into the twenty-first century and farther away from the event itself. Thirty years ago, as a result of the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, 1993 was described as “the year of the Holocaust.” Some have traced the coinage to a December 1993 episode of the news program Nightline. Historians have traditionally sketched a trajectory from the initial repression of the Holocaust in the 1940s and 50s, through major events such as the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, up to 1993, a watershed year in which it seemed as though the Western world had finally recognized the enormous scope of the tragedy. Many of our current educational tools were shaped at that time and need updating. This Regional Institute offered sessions that highlighted how much has changed over the last 30 years in the study of the Holocaust and its representation, in the commemorative practices surrounding it, and in how educators teach it to students.
The Regional Institute offered an opportunity for college-level instructors and museum professionals to expand their knowledge of various aspects of the history, memory, and representation of the Holocaust. Topics centered on themes related to the end of the Cold War, disability studies, literature, film, and the design and curation of museums. The Regional Institute’s organizing and teaching faculty included: Erin McGlothlin (Washington University in St. Louis); Brad Prager (University of Missouri); Warren Rosenblum (Webster University); Helen Turner (St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum); and Anika Walke (Washington University in St. Louis).
“Visual Culture and the Holocaust”
Oxford, Mississippi April 13-15, 2023
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) sponsored the Oxford, Mississippi Regional institute in cooperation with the University of Mississippi.
Representations of the Holocaust in visual arts have been the subject of numerous studies from the fields of history, art history, and visual culture. Important scholarly work has been done in the last decade on major film sources like Shoah, significant questions concerning photographs of atrocity, important exhibitions on the Holocaust, and debates about the spaces and buildings that shaped the genocide. Moreover, recent scholarship on this topic has delved into artwork from both victims and perpetrators, which complicates our understanding of Holocaust representation. The 2023 UM Regional Institute focused on representations of the Holocaust, both during and after the genocide in cinema, photography, architecture, and museums.
The Oxford Regional Institute offered an opportunity for university-level instructors and museum professionals to expand their knowledge of various aspects of the history, memory, and representation of the Holocaust. The Regional Institute will focus especially on historiographical debates on mass media, memorialization, and the art of the Holocaust. The Regional Institute’s organizers and teaching faculty included: Joshua First (University of Mississippi), Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University), and Hilary Earl (Nipissing University).
2021-2022
“Spaces and Places of the Holocaust”
Tempe, Arizona, April 1-3, 2022
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University sponsored the 2022 Arizona Regional Institute in cooperation with Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, and Jewish Studies Department; Northern Arizona University’s Martin-Springer Institute; and University of Arizona’s Arizona Center for Judaic Studies
The Arizona Regional Institute explored numerous spaces and places of the Holocaust, from sites of persecution and murder to sites of memory, such as camps, ravines, frontiers, and other landscapes of violence. It also explored online spaces - those used for Holocaust education and for dissemination of antisemitism and other hate.
ASU is a center for comparative genocide and a leader in online teaching. Regional Institute Fellows gained familiarity with debates on online Holocaust education and pedagogy, the Holocaust and comparative genocide, survivor testimony, reconciliation, migration and displacement, and memory of space and place. This institute supported Fellows looking to develop online courses on and pedagogy for the Holocaust, including comparative themes, approaches, and perspectives.
ASU is located in the US Southwest and home to Southwest Borderlands Initiative (SWBI). The Institute explored topics of frontiers, expansion, and borderlands in the Nazi East and the American West. Participants discussed ways in which Nazi notions of expansion invoked images of “Manifest Destiny” and settler-colonial expansion, including techniques and patterns of destroying Indigenous peoples and communities.
Faculty and Topics: Volker Benkert, “Holocaust and Film”; Jason Bruner and Timothy Langille, “Comparative Genocide”; Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, “Jewish Displacement and Migrations After WWII”; Jacob Flaws, “Sensory Witnessing at Treblinka: Charting Spaces of Smell, Sight, and Sound”’ Bjorn Krondorfer, “Unsettling Empathy”; and Natalie Lozinski-Veach, “Memory across Borders: Transnational Holocaust Literature”
“Post-War Memory, Holocaust Memorialization, and the Implications for the Present”
Durham, North Carolina, December 3-5, 2021
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University hosted the 2022 North Carolina Regional Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization in Durham, North Carolina on December 3-5, 2021, with the support of Wake Forest University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
There has been significant work in the past decades on postwar memory and memorialization as a crucial component of Holocaust Studies. Whether discussing the role of the trials of perpetrators, the reestablishment of Jewish communities in the diaspora, the rise in memorialization and other cultural representations of the Holocaust, or the explosive impact after 1993 of survivor oral testimonies for Holocaust research, it is clear that the postwar historical moment is an inextricable complement to the horrific pre-1945 history of the Holocaust. This HEF Regional Institute built on these broad trends by engaging in depth with one particular period of postwar memory and memorialization – the end of the war to the Auschwitz Trials (1963-65). This period on the whole has not received as much attention as the post-1965 histories; conversely, in recent years, some key work has refocused our disciplinary interests on this moment, particularly in terms of issues of memory and memorialization.
Fellows gained familiarity with historiographic debates related to postwar memory and memorialization (focusing on history, Jewish Studies, art history, and cultural history) but also a deep exploration into recent new work on the period that also has great relevance to the field as a whole.
Given the location of the Institute in the US South, the Regional Institute also explored how the specific history of the Holocaust helps us to particularize and compare the continued controversial impact and reception of Southern slavery and segregation on our public and private lives. Fellows explored historical connections between racist ideology and policies in the US and Nazi Germany (such as connections between Jim Crow and Nazi antisemitic legal policies) and parsed distinctions between different manifestations of racism and moments in racist histories to identify what is specific to place, context, and peoples.
Organizers: Karen Auerbach-UNC Chapel Hill; Paul B. Jaskot-Duke University; and Barry Trachtenberg-Wake Forest University
Guest Speakers: Danielle Christmas-UNC-Chapel Hill and S. Jonathan Wiesen-University of Alabama at Birmingham
2019
Inaugural Regional Institute 2019
“Teaching the Holocaust in the Global Age”
Bellingham, Washington, May 10-12, 2019
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) and The Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at Western Washington University, held the first Regional Institute for the Study of the Holocaust. The inaugural Institute was held on the campus of Western Washington University.
The Institute focused on new topics in the field, cutting-edge research, and pedagogical practices. Like the Summer Institute, the Regional Institute brought outstanding scholars with expertise in particular topics and practices to serve as faculty and create an environment conducive to high-level learning and discussion.
The Inaugural Regional Institute was taught by leading scholars in History, Musicology, and German Studies. Topics centered on themes related to teaching the Holocaust in the global age with a particular emphasis on the following: Antisemitism, Holocaust Education across the Curriculum, Holocaust Memorialization in Europe, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation, the Mediterranean Jewish Experience during the Holocaust, and Queer Theory and Gender. Faculty were: Professors Sandra Alfers, Sarah Cushman, Beth Griech-Polelle, Devin Naar, Amy Wlodarski, and Sarah Zarrow.
Please visit our website to learn more about The Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity (RWI) at Western Washington University.