Lessons & Legacies Europe
The Holocaust Educational Foundation hosts Lessons & Legacies every four years in Europe in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History-Munich, and the German Federal Agency for Civic Education.
Call for Papers
Lessons & Legacies Europe:
De-Centering Holocaust Studies
International Conference on the Holocaust
1-5 November 2027 (Monday-Friday)
Bucharest, Romania
Save the Date. The submission portal will open in September 2026. The deadline is December 14, 2026.
The third Lessons and Legacies Europe Conference will gather in Bucharest, Romania. Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, The “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, and the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania), the conference aims to bring together scholars working in different regions, languages, disciplines, discourses, and methodologies for intellectual exchange.
Keynote Speaker: Ambassador Radu Ioanid
We invite proposals for papers, panels, and workshops that engage with the theme “de-centering Holocaust Studies” from a broad range of vantage points and disciplines. The conference theme seeks to expand the compass of scholarly exchange by focusing on regions, approaches, languages, disciplines, and genres that have been at the periphery of discourse about the Holocaust. We encourage proposals that examine perpetrator cultures beyond Germany, killing sites beyond Auschwitz and other death camps, and understudied communities. We are interested in proposals that engage in methodologies and interpretive lenses of disciplines including history, literature, visual arts, cinema, music, sociology, environmental sciences, and other fields and that reflect on how decentering history reshapes established paradigms.
While geographically remote from the core of the Nazi empire, the regions of Eastern and Southeastern Europe were major sites of dispossession, imprisonment, exploitation, and mass murder that targeted Jews, Romani people, religious minorities, and other groups of “enemies.” Although these regions stood at the core of the Holocaust, until recently they have been at the periphery of the study of the Holocaust. We invite proposals that emerge from the burgeoning research on these locales and peoples. Nazi racial policies in North Africa have also been understudied and deserve more attention. What were the roles and the responses of perpetrators, bystanders, profiteers, resistors, rescuers, and victims in local persecutory and genocidal policies in these so-called peripheral regions? How do these categories themselves get redefined in light of regional phenomena?
How, for example, has Auschwitz – both as a site of atrocity and murder, and as a metonym for the Holocaust– shaped, amplified, focalized or limited evolving scholarly and public perceptions of the Holocaust? How do archives – in their complicated role in preserving, shaping, and limiting narratives – influence how we configure and reconfigure the past? What kinds of sources do we consider evidentiary, and what kinds of material have remained peripheral? How do we incorporate non-material elements of wartime experience, such as soundscapes? How does integrating the periphery reshape Holocaust education? How do new and peripheral approaches – such as those focused on social media, big data, (dark) tourism, the emotions, and the senses – influence disciplines like history and literature that remain central to Holocaust studies?
We are interested, as well, in questions of memory, memorialization, and post-war developments and representation. We seek proposals that explore different phases of the vast and ever-expanding range of discourses by novelists, poets, artists, survivors and their descendants, scholars, filmmakers, journalists, social media, and so forth. How are Jews, Romani people, and other persecuted groups represented in contemporary society – both in places where they currently live, and in places where they are no longer? What is testimony for? And what, in fact, is testimony? We are also interested in the understudied topic of postwar justice in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and North Africa. How did the processes of criminal and/or reparatory justice take place and what was their extent and influence on local societies?
Submission Deadline: 14 December 2026
The submission portal will open in September 2026.
Conference sessions include several formats, as outlined below. Submissions should clearly indicate one of these formats.
Individual Papers should include title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a short (1-2 page) CV. Individual submissions will be grouped into appropriate thematic panels by the conference chairs/organizers.
Conference Panels will consist of three to four papers and a moderator. Proposals for full panels should include the panel title and a brief description of the full session (up to 300 words). In addition, please submit a single PDF with all paper abstracts (up to 300 words each) and a single PDF with presenter CVs (1-2 pages each).
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, 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. Proposals should include title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a short (1-2 page) CV for each presenter.
Conference Committee:
Co-Chairs: Stefan Ionescu (Chapman University) and Sara Horowitz (York University)
Co-Hosts: Ana Bărbulescu ("Elie Wiesel" National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania) and Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Center for Holocaust Studies, Institute for Contemporary History, Munich)
Workshop/Seminar/Visiting Programs Coordinators: Dana Mihăilescu (University of Bucharest) and Florian Zabransky (German Federal Agency for Civic Education)
Member at Large: Sarah Cushman (Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University)
