First Fall 2021 Center Research Colloquium on Holocaust Testimony

Appalachian State’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies invites the academic public to its first research colloquium of Fall 2021. The Zoom-based event features Dr. Noah Shenker (Monash University), who will join live from Melbourne, Australia. The event will focus on Dr. Shenker’s much-noticed work on Holocaust survivor testimony. It is also the first of many programs that the Center will organize to remember and honor the legacy of its recently-deceased former director Prof. Rosemary Horowitz z’’l, who had invited our guest last year.

Register here.

Please note that this event was originally scheduled for April, but had to be postponed.

Organized by the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the program is co-sponsored by ASU's Department of History, ASU’s chapter of Hillel and AEPi, and the Temple of the High Country. Like all Center events, the online colloquia are free of charge and open to the scholarly and other publics. For more information, please contact the Center at 828.262.2311 or via e-mail.

Dr. Noah Shenker is the N. Milgrom and 6a Foundation Senior Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. He holds a PhD in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Dr. Shenker’s research and teaching traverse Jewish Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Cultural Studies, and Cinema and Media Studies. That interdisciplinary approach was at the center of his first book, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, published in 2015 by Indiana University Press as part of its Modern Jewish Experience series. Organized within a comparative framework, his book looks at three of the most extensive and distinctive archives of Holocaust testimony in the world: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Shenker investigates how the cultural and institutional histories and practices of those sites mediate the encounters between interviewers and interviewees and consider the extent to which testimonies are driven by the agency of witnesses and the itineraries of a given archive. In addition, he has written and published extensively on the representation of the Holocaust and genocide in testimony, film, and new media. His contributions include “‘I have never begun by asking the big questions’: Raul Hilberg as Historical Revenant in Shoah,” in the edited volume, The Invention of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and “Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies,” in History & Memory (2016). His current project (with co-author Associate Professor Dan Leopard) on which the talk is based -- and which is a parallel project to a joint research endeavor of the Holocaust Program at Western Galilee College, the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, and ASU's Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies -- explores Holocaust testimony beyond the "Era of the Witness" (A. Wieviorka).

The Center’s Research Colloquia are based on (1) pre-circulated texts that we ask everyone to read prior to the meeting. The featured scholars will then (2) give a (quite short) introduction to their work, also situating it in the broader literature and highlighting some of the key insights. Afterwards, the main segment of the event is taken up by (3) lively discussions that address all of the questions that participants may have. Towards the end of the colloquium, participants will (4) have an opportunity to benefit from our guests’ expertise by asking them for feed-back and help with their own research projects.