This two-week, intensive summer course will investigate the genealogy of the era of the witness, focusing on the emergence of Holocaust testimony as the model for eyewitness documentation of 20th and 21st-century atrocities, and its impact on efforts to record and represent subsequent human rights abuses and acts of mass violence.
The course will feature a series of workshops, seminars, public lectures, film screenings, and even a concert. The goal of the course is to bring together leading scholars of testimony and oral history, who engage in highly interdisciplinary approaches to documenting, studying, and interpreting the Holocaust and other genocides and mass atrocities through the lens of first-person accounts.
Participants will explore the vast genre of Holocaust testimony through readings, lectures, and hands-on work with a variety of primary sources. The course interrogates testimonies from historical, legal, and moral perspectives, raising theoretical and methodological questions about the "afterlife" of these sources, which are highly relevant for a wide variety of scholarly fields, including History, Jewish Studies, Nationalism Studies, Genocide Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural and Literary Studies, Memory Studies and Legal Studies.
In the second week of the course, special emphasis will be placed on the impact of digitization and new digital methods for presenting and analysing digital testimonies and their corresponding metadata.
The course will provide historical and epistemological contexts, introduce new methodological approaches to studying testimonies in the digital age, and more importantly, offer participants an opportunity to explore the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and other discrete collections of testimony in consultation with the leading experts in the field.
Co-funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN), and in cooperation with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies/Yale University, the Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien (VWI), the CEU - Nationalism Studies Program/Jewish Studies Program at CEU, and the University of Connecticut.
https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/courses/holocaust-testimonies-and-their-afterlives
Directors:
Éva Kovács (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies)
Michael L. Miller (Nationalism Program/Jewish Studies Program, Central European University)
Stephen Naron (Fortunoff Video Archive, Yale)
Avinoam Patt (Center for Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut)
Application deadline: 14 February 2023