Keynote Speaker: Dagmar Herzog

The year 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU). Founded in 1976 by Holocaust survivor and educator Theodore Zev Weiss and his wife Alice, HEFNU has grown into a diverse scholarly community, fostering regional, national, and international partnerships. Since its inception in November 1989, the Foundation's biennial Lessons and Legacies conference has become the premier international forum for scholarly discussion and the exchange of cutting-edge research on the Holocaust. 

Over the past half-century, the study of the history, (post)memory, and representations of the Holocaust has evolved into a dynamic transnational, multi-disciplinary, and multilingual field, enriched by its connections with diverse areas of inquiry. These intersections have broadened and opened new avenues for research and teaching, particularly as the field navigates the (dis)continuities that are emerging as we move into a post-survivor world. The importance and ethical implications of our work have been underscored and called into question by pressures on and challenges to Holocaust education and research, including the distortion, denial, and instrumentalization of the Holocaust, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and new media, as well as the resurgence of authoritarianism and virulent nationalism in the lands scarred by the Holocaust and in places that were once refuges from it. The eighteenth Lessons and Legacies Conference invites scholars to reflect on the contexts, connections, and (dis)continuities that have shaped, and continue to shape, our knowledge and understandings of the Holocaust.

The conference theme aims to open a comparative and integrated discussion of how the Holocaust can be understood as historically embedded yet universally relevant. Context could be interpreted, for example, as geographic, linguistic, temporal, discursive, socio-political, or metaphoric, while connections could imply relations across space and time from the micro to the macro. Continuities and discontinuities emphasize consistencies and shifts or ruptures, both latitudinally and longitudinally. At this moment of apparent (dis)continuity in academia and the wider world, we hope to create space for a range of discussions that advance Holocaust education and research, and connect it to the past, present, and future.

We invite proposals for individual papers, full panels, workshops, and seminars that address the broad themes of contexts, connections, and (dis)continuities as they relate to the Holocaust of European Jews, Roma, and other victim groups. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and diverse methodological perspectives from scholars at all career stages and across all relevant fields. Because we aim to explore new ways of approaching the Holocaust, we ask that proposals focus on research that has not been presented at previous Lessons and Legacies conferences.

Submission Deadline: Monday, December 15, 2025.

Conference sessions include several formats, as outlined below:

For individual papers and full panel proposals, we welcome the trend toward increasingly collaborative work and are happy to acknowledge co-authors, but for logistical issues of hotel space, presentation time, and limited financial assistance for presenters, we ask that only one author submit a proposal and, if accepted, present a paper.

Individual Papers will be organized into panels by the conference chairs.  Paper proposals should include a title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a short (1–2 pages) CV. 

Full Panels will consist of three or four papers and a chair/moderator. One member of the proposed panel should submit a brief description of the full session (up to 300 words). In addition, each individual presenter should submit an abstract (up to 300 words) and a short CV (1–2 pages). The conference committee will assign a chair/moderator to accepted panels that do not already have 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. The conference committee will prioritize proposals centered on participation and discussion.  Workshop proposals should include a title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a short CV (1–2 pages) of each presenter.

Seminars may be proposed by 2-3 scholars. Seminars bring together a diverse group of up to 12 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/or position papers made available before the conference.  Seminar proposals should include a title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a short (1–2 pages) CV of the organizers. 

Seminar Organizers: Jennifer Geddes and Sven-Erik Rose

This seminar explores ethics not through reflections after or about the Holocaust, but by paying attention to ethical reflections, deliberations, and decisions that occurred during the Holocaust, in the midst of the catastrophic events as they were unfolding. The aim is to attend to the ethical activities of both those experiencing and those perpetrating the genocide, while it was still ongoing and in the unresolved aftermath of the immediate postwar years.

Ethical thinking is prominent in virtually all modes of wartime writing, including diaries, reportages, poems, short stories, autobiographical prose, and theological reflections. How did victims of the Holocaust cling to and revise received notions and forge new conceptions of themselves as individual and collective ethical agents? How victims avail themselves of (strained, burdened, sometimes collapsing) ethical frameworks and moral judgment in real time offers an understudied window onto their lived experience and attempts to assert ethical agency amid events that seek to diminish or destroy that agency.

How do ethical frameworks persist, break down, or get rewritten as perpetrators move into unprecedented territory? What provokes ethical deliberation among perpetrators, and what inhibits it? How does ethical thinking obstruct, and how might it sustain, active participation in genocide? How did official Nazi discourse couched in terms of ethical imperatives align or stand in tension with private ethical meditations among perpetrators?

We welcome scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds—history, philosophy, ethics, religion, literature, and more—including those working on secular or religious ethical thought, on victims or perpetrators, on the Holocaust or other atrocities, on historical events or ethical theory.

Applications should include a 300-word abstract; a suggestion of one or more readings (theoretical or historical; primary or secondary) with a brief comment on how they pertain to general questions the seminar seeks to engage; and a two-page CV. Please include both your abstract and reading suggestions in the “Description” section of the application form.

Final paper drafts (min 3,000-max 6,500 words) will be due October 4, 2026, for circulation among seminar participants prior to the start of the seminar on November 13. If your paper is part of a larger project, you may wish to include a brief statement situating it.

Seminar Organizers: Daniel Greene and Alexandra Zapruder

Holocaust education is in the midst of an existential crisis. Recent surveys report that students lack basic knowledge of Holocaust history. Some observers insist that the rise in antisemitism, including violence against Jews, proves that Holocaust education has failed. One even blames Holocaust educators for making antisemitism worse. While many critics line up to find faults with Holocaust education, it is not clear that its goals and purposes ever have been well defined.

The seminar seeks to bring together scholars and educators to examine the past, present, and future of Holocaust education. Together, we will ask: What can and should Holocaust education do?

We invite contributions to this seminar that address questions, including:

• What are the origins of Holocaust education and how have assumptions about its purpose changed over time?
• How and why has Holocaust education come to be shaped by a set of moral and emotional expectations?
• Is Holocaust education prepared to meet the challenges of present-day antisemitism, including Holocaust denial and distortion?
• Is Holocaust education prepared to meet the challenges of present-day politics, including authoritarianism?
• How should Holocaust education evolve in the absence of living witnesses and survivors?

Those who would like to participate in this seminar should apply by sending a two-page CV and a 300-word statement detailing how their work and perspective could contribute to the seminar. We will consider submissions from scholars, journalists, educators, museum professionals, and others.

Seminar participants will be asked to submit a piece of written work to share and discuss with the group. These submissions can take the form of thought pieces, lesson plans, project proposals, or the like, provided that they directly address the questions above. We especially welcome creative, innovative ideas that challenge longstanding assumptions about what Holocaust education can and should do. These contributions will be distributed among the participants before the conference.  We also may pre-assign some foundational readings in Holocaust education for seminar participants to complete prior to the meeting in Chicago.

Seminar organizers: Shirli Gilbert and Rosa de Jong

Work on Jewish refugees from Nazism has grown over the past few decades into a rich and varied body of scholarship exploring the destinations that drew the largest flows of refugees (the US, Britain, Palestine) as well as further-flung destinations including Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and beyond. As much of this research is recent, studies often remain focused on the national or regional level. By bringing together scholars researching a wide variety of case studies, this seminar offers an opportunity to deepen discussion about refugees’ overlapping experiences and to explore thematic and concrete links across places of refuge.

The workshop positions the conversation about Holocaust refugees on a global canvas, asking what insights can be gained by more sustained thinking between and across geographical and cultural contexts. What were different refugees’ encounters, for example, with British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and other colonial regimes? To what extent did ambiguous ‘whiteness’ or Jewishness inform refugees’ engagement with racialized or mestizo societies? How did factors such as gender, socio-economic background, age, religious identity, and nationality shape their experiences as well as the sources they were able (or not able) to produce? What was the wider political, intellectual, and social impact of links forged through the movement of people as well as letters, ideas, and material goods across refugee communities? What heritage and legacies (material and immaterial) remain in places of arrival, departure, transit, and settlement, and how do these help to shape refugee histories as well as memorialisation practices? Other questions to be considered include sources and methods, imagined routes, internment, military service, and aid for refugees.

We aim to facilitate a conversation that goes beyond our individual research and results in a genuinely collaborative discussion. The meetings will be based not around discussion of individual case studies but rather around themes that range across the case studies. Participants will be invited to offer short reflections (8-10 minutes) on one of these themes, both as it relates to their region and more widely. Each meeting will open with 3-4 of these reflections, followed by group discussion. The aim will be not only to explore common themes but also to identify points of divergence and conflict.

The workshop will be closed to non-participants, as we want participants to feel able to probe freely and explore tentative ideas.

Practicalities

In advance of the conference, participants will be asked to pre-circulate a brief overview of their case study (2-3,000 words), including historical and geographical information, research questions, sources, and dominant themes. These papers do not need to be polished and can be made up partly of bullet points. The point is to ensure that participants have a basic familiarity with one another’s work before we begin.

Participants will also be asked to attend a 90-minute Zoom meeting 1-2 weeks before the conference, where we will briefly introduce our work to the group, so we can hit the ground running in Chicago.

We are conceptualizing a nascent book project that we believe will serve as an essential teaching text in the university classroom. We nonetheless do not expect all seminar participants to contribute to the book, nor do we expect that the book will consist only of contributions from participants. Following the conference, we will schedule an optional Zoom session for those interested in discussing the book project further.

Please submit a 2-page CV and a 300-word abstract outlining your research area and how you would contribute to a broader discussion addressing the themes and questions above.

We welcome applications from PhD students and early-career scholars as well as more established scholars.

Organizers: Thomas Kühne and Erin McGlothlin

The last decades have seen an extensive body of research on Holocaust perpetrators. Such groundbreaking work has been conducted first and foremost by historians and social scientists, who have created a multidimensional scholarship illuminating the organizational, logistical, situational, and socio-psychological dynamics of perpetration. But more recent contributions also been made by scholars of culture, literature, and film, who have examined the complexities of perpetrator representation both during and after the Holocaust. In this way, crucial issues, including the diversity of perpetrators and their ideological backgrounds, the fluidity of the concept of the perpetrator and neighboring concepts, as well as appropriate approaches to exploring their minds and actions, have been subject to ongoing debates. What remains to be accomplished, however, is a substantive interdisciplinary interchange between these two broad groups.

Focusing on a core set of foundational texts (both primary documents and representations and secondary analyses) and using multiple methodological perspectives, this seminar will engage junior and senior scholars across the disciplines in contextualized dialogue. Central to our discussion will be possibilities for disciplinary cross-fertilization: historians and social scientists can bring their knowledge of primary sources, organizational structures, individual and group dynamics, and historical contexts to bear on the cultural depictions of perpetrators, while scholars of literature and culture can contribute their expertise in narrative and visual representation and representational ethics to provide new frameworks for historical and social analysis. The goal is to provide a more comprehensive approach not only to the complex interplay of ideology, personal motives, social pressures, and institutional dynamics that led individuals to participate in mass violence, but also the diversity of representations of perpetrators in media, art, trials, and scholarship and the ways in which they have been inspired by or answer to societal, political, and generational changes.

This seminar seeks applications from scholars (including advanced graduate students and early career scholars) engaging in research on Holocaust perpetrators from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. Interested applicants should submit a two-page CV and a 300-word statement about how new or ongoing research could contribute to the seminar.

Accepted participants will be asked to submit position papers by October 4, 2026. The position paper should consist of about 2,000 words and contain two sections of roughly equal length. In the first section, the participant should respond to one or more of the assigned readings; in the second, they should outline a new or ongoing research project that relates to the interdisciplinary inquiry of Holocaust perpetrator studies. Position papers will be distributed to participants in advance of the seminar.

Organizers: Émilie Duranceau-Lapointe and Verena Meier

 This seminar creates an interdisciplinary forum to examine petitioning as a political and social practice and to reconsider concepts of marginalization and belonging in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century with a focus on petitions as acts and instruments of response and expressions of agency during the Holocaust.

By situating petitioning within shifting historical and political contexts, the seminar explores how these written performances reflected and reshaped relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. Petitions illuminate shifting notions of identity and belonging, as well as contestations of state-imposed categorizations across regimes.

Participants are invited to present case studies illustrating how marginalized groups—such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and other minorities—navigated bureaucratic and legal institutions to challenge categorizations and assert their rights. Beyond acts of resistance, these petitions frequently emerged as crucial strategies for negotiation and survival, particularly during the Holocaust.

Welcoming scholars working across disciplines and methods, this seminar encourages transnational, comparative, and cross-temporal perspectives. Bridging history, sociology, gender studies, legal studies, and critical race theory, it approaches petitioning not merely as a bureaucratic process but as a dynamic site of interaction between individuals and state authorities. Addressing issues from release from concentration camps to the contestations of racial classifications, petitions reveal how petitioners maneuvered state mechanisms to shape their social and legal identities and contest their marginalization.

By foregrounding the contexts, connections, and (in)consistencies of petitioning practices across different political regimes, the seminar offers a framework for understanding how ordinary acts of writing illuminate extraordinary moments of rupture and (dis)continuities. Bringing together innovative and interdisciplinary research perspectives, it seeks to connect early career and established scholars and to foster collaboration.

Applications consist of the filled-out online form, a paper title and proposal (maximum 300 words), and a curriculum vitae (1-2 page).

Organizers: Chad S.A. Gibbs, Avinoam Patt, Stephen Naron, and Hana G. Green

We invite applications for a three-session working seminar centered on a new international oral history initiative focused on the experiences of the “second generation”— the children of Holocaust survivors. Developed collaboratively by a group of scholars in Holocaust oral histories, this project examines how inherited memory, postwar identity, and intergenerational trauma are shaped through narrative and testimony.

This seminar offers a unique opportunity to engage with a project in progress. Participants will contribute to critical conversations, offer feedback on emerging research, and help shape the future direction of oral history within Holocaust studies.

The seminar will consist of three one-hour sessions, each grounded in pre-circulated materials.

• Session 1: Framing the Project
  Introduction to the project’s scope, goals, and guiding questions, with particular attention to approaches to interviewing the children of survivors. Discussion will focus on narrative, and interpretive frameworks, and participants will be invited to provide feedback on terminology, aims, and direction.
• Session 2: Methods and Practice
  A practical exploration of oral history methodologies and technologies, including interview design, writing questions, recording practices, transcription, digital archiving, and long-term access.
• Session 3: Conceptual and Ethical Reflections
  A broader discussion of the theoretical and ethical stakes of interviewing the second generation, including questions of terminology, intergenerational memory, and the psychological dimensions of testimony. This session will center on a pre-circulated paper presenting preliminary findings from the project’s first cohort of interviews.

We encourage scholars working in oral history, memory studies, and related areas of Holocaust studies to submit a brief statement (no more than 350 words). Please describe how your work—past, present, and/or future—as well as your perspective, would contribute to the seminar. We also encourage you to highlight specific topics related to the future of oral history in Holocaust research that you are particularly interested in discussing or developing during the seminar.

Seminar Organizers: Kathryn Huether, Nicole Steinberg, Abby Anderton

While visual and textual forms have long dominated the representation of historical trauma, the role of sound in commemorative practices remains underexamined in Holocaust and genocide studies. This seminar invites participants to explore how music, voice, silence, and soundscapes shape the mediation of atrocity across institutional, artistic, and digital contexts.

Bringing together scholars working across disciplines, the seminar asks how sonic practices participate in the construction, transmission, and contestation of collective memory. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, we are particularly interested in how sonic materials—ranging from museum exhibitions and audio guides to activist performance and digital sound art—create relational frameworks for engaging histories of violence, including the Holocaust, anti-Romani persecution, American enslavement, and colonialism.

The seminar will be organized around three thematic conversations:
(1) Theoretical Foundations (sound studies, memory studies, museum ethics);
(2) Comparative Case Studies (institutional, grassroots, and digital practices); and
(3) Ethics and Methodologies (approaches to analyzing and curating sound in commemorative contexts).

Participants will circulate short position papers or case studies in advance and engage in sustained, discussion-based sessions across the conference.

We invite proposals that address questions such as:

• How is sound used to represent, mediate, or contest histories of mass violence?
• What ethical responsibilities accompany sonic representations of atrocity?
• How do sonic practices navigate tensions between emotional affect and historical fidelity?
• In what ways do different acoustic, cultural, and technological environments shape practices of listening and remembrance?
• How might sound reinforce dominant narratives—or unsettle them?

We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including (but not limited to) musicology/ethnomusicology, history, media studies, anthropology, museum studies, sound studies, and digital humanities. Projects at all stages are encouraged, particularly those that foreground methodological experimentation or interdisciplinary approaches.

Application Requirements:
Please submit a 300-word abstract outlining your proposed contribution, along with a brief bio (300 words).

Seminar Organizers: Atina Grossmann, Frances Tanzer and Sheer Ganor

The seminar will investigate the omission that has been termed the “Palestine Exception” as it presents itself in the field of Holocaust Studies. In the past decade, Holocaust scholarship proved transformative: scholars enriched the field with expanded geographies and chronologies, as well as with theoretical approaches influenced by post-colonial studies, gender and queer studies, and histories of emotions. We seek to extend this dynamism to topics entangled with Palestine, Zionism, and Israel. Despite abundant historical connections linking the events of the Holocaust, the trajectory of political Zionism, and the Nakba, Holocaust scholarship and memory tend to evade such questions. The evasion is even more glaring considering the field’s growing engagement with transnational histories of colonialism and the global transit of refugees from Nazism and the Holocaust.

In this seminar, an interdisciplinary group of scholars will engage in open and critical discussion about the implications of the “Palestine Exception” for our research and our field.

The questions we hope to raise include:

• What are the intellectual and institutional structures that sustain the “Palestine Exception” in our field?
• How has it shaped scholarly production, including dominant interpretive frameworks?
• How does the “Palestine Exception” impact the archives and sources that we work with?
• How should we expand our source base to address this gap, and in particular, how might we integrate materials from Palestine and Nakba Studies, to reconsider our own work?

We aim to explore these questions with scholars studying themes such as refugees and displacement, reparations, solidarity struggles, and memory cultures. We aim to facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation, bringing together participants with diverse methodologies and perspectives. We encourage the participation of scholars at various career stages, with a particular focus on junior scholars.

Applications should include an abstract of 300 words and an abbreviated CV of 2 pages. Accepted participants will share a short paper that will be pre-circulated in advance.

Organizers: Eliyana Adler, Natalia Aleksiun, Yael Paulina Robinson Gottfeld, Laurien Vastenhout, Serafima Velkovich

This seminar explores the emotional landscapes of Holocaust victims during the war and in its aftermath, foregrounding the diversity of relational entanglements and family structures. These include nuclear and surrogate families, Jewish–non-Jewish mixed families, romantic and pragmatic relationships, and same-sex partnerships. By examining intimacy, personal agency, and the continuities and ruptures in communal affective norms, this seminar addresses forms of emotional expression under extreme conditions—an area that remains significantly under-researched within Holocaust studies. This perspective also enables comparative analysis across different communities in Europe and beyond, raising questions about both continuity and transformation in wartime and postwar family-making.

The seminar incorporates collaborative source analysis through the lens of material culture, with particular attention to letters as affective objects that sustained and expressed social worlds. Through close readings of personal correspondence – especially love letters – participants will develop a much-needed comparative framework for understanding emotional attachment in everyday life during and after the Holocaust. In addition, the seminar will examine diaries, memoirs, and testimonies as key media through which emotional bonds were communicated, negotiated, and preserved.

Bringing together scholars from history, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, Jewish and Romani studies, psychology, and related disciplines, the seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue through presentations, roundtables, and collaborative analysis of primary sources. Expected outcomes include the establishment of a research network and the development of innovative approaches to integrating family-centered perspectives into Holocaust research and pedagogy, while generating comparative insights across survivor communities and geographic contexts.

Possible themes include:

• Love in its many forms: emotional ties between spouses, lovers, siblings, friends, and parents and children; falling in love during and after the Holocaust.
• Language and expression: the cultural and gendered nature of love language; writing in imposed languages; coded love; translation issues.
• The material cultures of letters and other sources: handwriting, typing, drawings, symbols of affection. The afterlives of letters in archives, museums, and family collections; questions of access and inheritance.
• The practices of writing and reading: how letters were produced, circulated, received, and preserved.
• Methodological and ethical concerns: what it means to read intimate, often one-sided documents; problems of privacy, voyeurism, and the limits of accessing and representing emotions.

We invite scholars who work on the themes outlined above to apply by sending a written CV (300 words) 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.