The Seventeenth Biennial Lessons and Legacies Conference is sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, and hosted by Claremont McKenna College and the University of Southern California. This conference will focus on languages of the Holocaust and its history, representation, and memory. We aim to bring together scholars working in different languages, disciplines, discourses, and methodologies for intellectual exchange.

Keynote Speakers: Christopher Browning and Sara Horowitz

Leading scholars in Holocaust History and Holocaust Literature respectively, Browning and Horowitz will reflect on the theme of the conference from their different disciplinary perspectives and in light of their long careers in the field.

Conference Theme: Languages of the Holocaust

We encourage proposals that interpret the theme “languages of the Holocaust” from a wide range of vantage points and disciplines. The conference theme refers both to the specific languages in which people have spoken and written—during and about—the Holocaust, as well as the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in a wide range of discourses (documentary, archival, testimonial, judicial, academic, artistic, non-verbal, photographic). We are interested in proposals that explore different phases of the vast and ever-expanding range of postwar discourses by survivors and their descendants, scholars, artists, filmmakers, journalists, and so forth. Further, we invite proposals that take up issues of translation in both its literal and figurative meanings in the field of Holocaust Studies.

Questions of interest include: What role did linguistic strategies—and strategic silences—play in extending Nazism’s reach and in the perpetration of the Holocaust? What cultural, social, and political tensions or hierarchies emerged between different linguistic and cultural communities in the ghettos and camps? During the Holocaust, what strategies did Jewish writers and activists adopt to try to keep sensitive topics and projects illegible to potential Nazi observers/readers? How do the conceptual paradigms—and the literal languages—of wartime documents differ from those of postwar written and oral memoir and testimony?

How have paradigms and presuppositions in the history of the Holocaust, the study of Holocaust testimony, literature and film, and/or ethical reflections on the Holocaust and its legacy been shaped by the inclusion or exclusion of documents or whole archives in certain languages? How have political and ideological languages, particularly of the Cold War and of Zionism, highlighted, manipulated, suppressed, or represented events and documents of the Holocaust? What is the role of translation in mediating, shaping, popularizing, flattening, or obscuring our understanding of the Holocaust? Do artifacts of visual culture transcend linguistic boundaries, or relate to specific language traditions in specific ways? Does silence relate to all languages identically, or to specific languages in particular ways (does silence have an accent)? How might the discourses of history and the languages of memory and memorialization differ across nations, disciplines, and a group’s situatedness in relation to the Holocaust?

The above questions are meant to suggest and facilitate, but not to limit, possibilities for reflection and exchange. We invite proposals on any aspect of the Holocaust, in addition to those focused on the conference theme. Because we want to encourage exploration of new ways of approaching the Holocaust, we ask that proposals focus on research that the scholar has not presented at a previous Lessons and Legacies conference.

Submission Deadline: 4 December 2023

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Conference sessions include several formats, as outlined below. Submissions should clearly indicate one of these formats. We welcome the trend toward increasingly collaborative work and are happy to acknowledge co-authors (identify in proposal), but for logistical issues of hotel space, presentation time, and limited financial assistance for presenters, we ask that only one person submit a proposal and, if accepted, present a paper.

Individual Papers will be organized into panels by the conference chairs, if accepted. 

Full Panels will consist of three or four papers and a moderator. (Conference Chairs will assign a moderator for panels without one.) 

Workshops consisting of one or two presenters should focus on particular questions, approaches, or sources. Workshops are intended to be interactive and practical, highlighting, for example, a new pedagogical approach or research question or method, curricular innovations, or creative ways to examine and interpret artifacts or texts both in research and the classroom. Conference organizers will prioritize proposals centered on participation and discussion.

Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars at various career levels for three meetings over the course of the conference for sustained exploration of a question or problem. Participants will discuss a common list of readings and position papers. Seminar proposals should include a seminar title and abstract (up to 300 words) that describes a compelling case for why this particular issue should be explored, and a CV for each seminar organizer. If your seminar is accepted, conference organizers will contact you with information about next steps for calls for applications. 

Note: Conference organizers will issue a call for applications for seminar participation in Spring 2024. Seminar organizers will accept 8 papers per seminar. Seminar papers must be available to post by 29 September 2024. Seminars can be designated as open or closed to auditors, at the discretion of the seminar organizer. We encourage open seminars but appreciate that in certain cases there are good rationales for keeping a seminar closed to non-participants.

Conference Co-Chairs:

Jennifer Geddes (University of Virginia) and Sven-Erik Rose (University of California, Davis)

Conference Co-Hosts:

Wolf Gruner (University of Southern California) and Wendy Lower (Claremont-McKenna College)

Workshop and Seminar Coordinator:

Anna Veprinska (University of Calgary)

 

Questions regarding registration and submission can be addressed to hef@northwestern.edu.

Seminar Organizers: Vanda Rajcan and Philipp Dinkelaker

Following World War II, most European countries held national trials to sentence or rehabilitate Nazi collaborators. This seminar looks at specific case studies of collaboration to examine how various countries addressed the past in the courtrooms immediately after the war. We explore how officials defined Holocaust-related crimes, how different actors grappled with wider and conflicting versions of wartime events, and how these trials contributed to the reconstruction of national self-images as victims. 

Drawing on extensive trial records and oral testimonies, the seminar aims to compare wartime narratives presented during trial proceedings and maps political, social, and symbolic commonalities between cases that were long studied in isolation. The seminar is especially interested in the language employed during trials, bringing out inconsistencies between different postwar justice systems, as lay judges dispensed justice without proper training and in changing political contexts – challenges that continue decades after the Holocaust.

In bringing together national case studies, the seminar makes new connections between trials, highlighting differences and similarities considering varied occupation experiences and postwar political frameworks that impacted both the legal and historical terminology. We also hope our conversations highlight interdisciplinary methodologies scholars have used to analyze these sources, share archival tips for problematic source access, and the ways we can use legal documents in our classrooms. Finally, the seminar reflects on the legacies of the trials in collaborationist countries and what role they had in shaping public memories and narratives of the Second World War, including the involvement of local citizens in Nazi crimes. 

Applications should include a 300-word abstract.

Seminar Organizers: Sarah Phillips Casteel, Natalie Eppelsheimer, and Tabea Linhard

The “colonial turn” in Holocaust studies has opened up new research areas such as multidirectional memory, intersections between colonial violence and European fascism, and refugees from Nazism who fled to colonized places. At the same time, these new research directions have drawn attention to overlooked archives, authors, and texts. In this seminar, we will consider how our teaching of Holocaust studies is changing to reflect these new intersectional, comparative, and globalized frameworks. The seminar will create a collaborative space in which participants can share and critically reflect on sources and teaching approaches. Each participant will present to the group one teaching source (literary text, image, diary, letter, audio recording, video recording, etc.) that they will discuss in relation to the following questions:

• Which sources are we including (or envisioning including) in our syllabi that open up intersectional, comparative, and globalized perspectives on the Holocaust?
• Which sources help to expand the languages of the Holocaust in relation to languages of refuge (Mani 2022)?
• How do these materials speak both to earlier moments in history and to the present?
• How do they foreground “implicated subjects” (Rothberg 2019) that complicate victim/perpetrator binaries?
• How are students from different backgrounds responding to these sources? How can we foster a dialogue that is productive and inclusive?
• How do the locations in which we are teaching, including local histories of violence, shape our approaches?
• How are we bringing Holocaust studies into dialogue with other fields that grapple with histories of violence and genocide?
• What kinds of tensions and blockages are we encountering (from students, colleagues, and institutions)?

By sharing our teaching experiences, areas of expertise, and pedagogical visions, this seminar aims to build a corpus of materials that will help open up new directions in Holocaust education.

Please submit a 300-word proposal indicating which teaching source you plan to present.

Seminar Organizer: Henry Greenspan

This seminar will pursue a radical reassessment of concepts that underlie much of our work on Holocaust victims (both survivors and the dead)—especially testimony, trauma, resilience, legacies, memory, and their intergenerational transmission. The core issues are not semantic; they concern practice. That is, our central concern is how these concepts have shaped the ways we have engaged and imagined survivors and the lost--for good and for ill, yielding both clarity and distortion.

Of particular interest is sharing projects in which conventional notions of testimony, trauma, et al were clearly a bad fit. As a result, a different terminology was developed or the old terms were used but significantly qualified. Or they were used reluctantly--like the mountain, because they “were there.”

The seminar, then, is oriented especially to discussing work—scholarly, artistic, or interventionist (e.g., therapeutic or political)—in which the limits of conventional concepts became apparent. Purely theoretic discussions of terms are welcome if they are deeply historicized, including detailed documentation of when, how, where, and why (as knowable), the current lexicon emerged and evolved.

As time and interest suggest, we may also discuss the place of “memorial” in our time, and the deletion of the term “memorial” from the names of a number of Holocaust museums and “centers” in their “rebranding” (their term) decisions.  If even more time and interest suggest, assessing the usefulness of concepts like “choiceless choice” or “deep memory” may also be possible.

Organizationally, each seminar session will likely focus on problematics related to one or two central concepts. For example: (Day 1) Testimony and Witnessing; (Day 2) Trauma and Resilience; (Day 3) Memory and its Intergenerational Transmission. But, of course, that will depend on what participants bring. Since concepts related to Holocaust victims have so often been used in work with victims of other genocides and atrocities, we will also consider the usefulness of that migration.

Regarding what is due:  The application due by March 31 should include an adequate summary of the work and questions that  describe as specifically as possible the applicant's practice and the ways that led to engaging the questions the seminar will explore.  e.g., "Is this a useful concept for what I'm learning or doing?  Is that the right term?" etc   That should be up to 500 words.  A two-page CV should also be included.

For what is due at the end of September, accepted participants are welcome to submit a full paper, up to 6,000 words including notes.  However, shorter pieces of 1500-2000 words are also welcome, especially if they raise specific questions—including in list/bullet point format--that describe the challenges (terminological, conceptual, practical) a participant has engaged in their work and that are likely to serve our wider discussions.

Once a membership list is established, we will arrange one pre-conference zoom session to meet and clarify anything procedural.

Seminar Organizers: Pragya Kaul, Sandra Gruner-Domić, and Atina Grossmann

Scholarship that decenters Europe in the 20^th century has now also begun to remap our understanding of the Holocaust, particularly through studies of refugees from National Socialism and the ways they have been remembered, both by refugees themselves and in the regions to which they fled. This research, however, has largely remained siloed within nation-state forms that emerged in the aftermath of the World Wars and decolonization, neglecting the intersections of this history with transnational and imperial networks of ideas, law-making, knowledge-transfer, trade, labor, and migration. The flight of Jewish refugees was influenced by multiple transnational actors and interests, including humanitarian aid organizations, government agencies, and politicians searching for solutions to social, economic, and demographic problems not directly linked to the dangers refugees were fleeing. To account for these contexts requires research on forced migration after 1933 and its memory that integrates local histories, considers the impact of imperial structures in a nationalizing international realm, and moves away from a simple model of departure and arrival.This seminar aims to bring together scholars examining these intersections of the Holocaust and the histories of regions in the global South. We aim to encourage a theoretically informed discussion that invites transcontinental comparisons and reflections on the convergences and divergences of National Socialist expulsion and displacement and the Holocaust with broader discourses of humanitarianism, imperialism, nationalism, internationalism, and (racialized) capitalism. Towards this, we invite scholars whose work broadly considers the following questions:

1. How does a potential “postcolonial” shift in scholarship expand our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II? What are the limits and possibilities  of this “postcolonial” shift? How might it differ from what has been termed a “colonial” or “imperial” turn in scholarship on refugees from National Socialism and the Holocaust?
2. What theoretical and methodological approaches can inform scholars’ integration of the Holocaust with local and regional histories of the global South?
3. What analytical frameworks bridge the boundaries of the nation-state in this emerging subfield of Holocaust scholarship?

Applications should include an abstract of no more than 350 words. Final paper drafts for circulation to other seminar participants will be due on September 29, 2024.

Seminar Organizers: Daniel H. Magilow, Steven Weiss Samols, Rachel Schaff, and Abigail Lewis

Studies of Holocaust photographs and films exist at the intersection of disciplines, including, but not limited to, art history, film and media studies, history, and memory studies. This seminar approaches this interdisciplinarity as a conceptual space in which to rethink the intersections of Holocaust images across cultures, geographies, languages, media, and temporalities. Building on recent studies by Tobias Ebbrect-Hartmann, Wendy Lower, and David Shneer, among others, we will consider different methodologies for studying the aesthetic, historical, and socio-political dimensions of Holocaust photographs and films.  We encourage proposals that explore the lives and afterlives of Holocaust images, their representational strategies, circulation, and migration, as they move across and within different media–from still to moving, fiction to non-fiction, evidence to icon.  Our goal is to bring together proposals from different disciplines for a focused conversation about the circulation and appropriation of Holocaust images in visual culture and take stock of these intersections in the present.

Applications should include a 300-word abstract.

Seminar Organizers: Björn Krondorfer and Christin Zühlke

The objective of this seminar is to gather scholars working on the intersection of Holocaust studies and gender to probe the multiplicity of male agency during the Holocaust years, including the years leading up to genocidal antisemitism and the immediate post-Holocaust years. The purpose of this workshop is to think about levels of complicit and implicated behavior and choices rather than the full spectrum of men’s roles and identities during those years. “Rereading” male agency, hence, refers to applying a gender-conscious approach to various forms of textual and visual remnants and evidence to explore and analyze the complexity of male agency (behavior, choices, thought-patterns, justifications, etc.) during times of coercive genocidal violence. In this workshop, the participating scholars would work on particular examples while discussing conceptual pathways and multi-disciplinary models that complicate a simple and binary victim-perpetrator divide in relation to male agency. This workshop, then, would focus on case studies that put a spotlight on men as gendered beings related to the history and legacy of the Holocaust. The seminar will focus on masculinities during the Holocaust but aims to include research on non-binary and trans people as well.

The terms “implicated” and “complicit” refer, in an expanded sense, to Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of “implicated subjects” (2019), a particularly useful term when addressing people who do not easily fall into categories of either victims or perpetrators, and for whom even terms like accomplice, bystander, or beneficiary do not work well. For our seminar, we suggest exploring a more expansive understanding, one in which complicit and implicated male agency relates to men operating in the gray zones of temporary or diminished authority at various ends of the victim-perpetrator divide, which could include forced conscriptions or any other forms of “involuntary” assignments of limited power.

We welcome methodological and disciplinary diversity, including (but not limited to) history, literature, Jewish studies, philosophy, religion, visual art/photography, sociology, and genocide studies. Reaching out to early career and established scholars, we expect workshop participants to be willing to learn from each other. If, at the end of the seminar, there is a wish to publish together a themed journal issue or edited book, we would welcome it. We are especially interested in submissions from early career scholars.

The deadline for proposals is March 31, 2024. Proposals should be written in English, and include an abstract of the proposed article (up to 500 words). Applicants will be notified by May, and papers will be due on September 29, 2024. Each paper should be up to three pages.

Seminar Organizers: Benjamin Frommer, Adrian-Nicolae Furtună, and Laurien Vastenhout

No topic consumed more time at the Wannsee Conference than the question of intermarried Jews and so-called Mischlinge.  Whereas the Nazis disagreed little about the fate of most Jews, the minority who had non-Jewish spouses, and especially their “mixed” offspring, challenged Hitler’s Manichean worldview.  Despite the contemporary preoccupation with the intermarried, for decades scholars treated their fate as marginal.  Recent publications have increased our knowledge about intermarried Jews in Central Europe, but there is a need for further scholarship on the rest of the continent. If the experience of intermarried Jews and their offspring is still understudied, intermarried Roma and Sinti are rarely addressed in the literature. Meanwhile, comparative work on intermarriage has generally not included partners whose relationships could not be legally consecrated, including same-sex couples and those whose bonds were banned by decrees against so-called miscegenation.

This seminar is designed to encourage a comparative, integrated, and interdisciplinary discussion to broaden understandings of the diverse experiences of mixed couples and families during the Nazi era. We aim to pay particular attention to: the disconnect between state-imposed categories and self-identification; the language used from above and below to describe mixedness in the various national and social contexts of the time; the experience and fate of the children and relatives of mixed couples, including those who belonged to majority society; marriages that crossed recognized national, not “racial” lines; and the ways in which micro-historical and transnational approaches to the topic challenge traditional nation-based and victim-group narratives of the Holocaust.  The seminar’s goal is to expand the current academic discussion of intermarriage to capture the plethora of mixed relationships that confronted genocidal antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and exclusionary nationalism in Nazi Europe. 

We invite scholars who work on the themes outlined above to apply by sending a two-page CV and a short (300 words) statement on how their work (past, present and/or future) and perspective could contribute to the seminar. Those accepted to the seminar will be asked to submit work engaging with this topic, which may take the form of a paper, research statement or proposal, observations on the current standing of the historiography, relevant research questions, etc. These will be distributed among the participants before the start of the first seminar meeting.

Application Deadline:  March 31, 2024

Deadline for written work: September 29, 2024