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On April 11, 2013 Professor Aomar Boum presented an overview of his research dealing with the Holocaust in Moroccan official and public discourses. The recording of this presentation is now available for viewing on the CHGS YouTube channel. You can access the video by clicking here.

The lecture was a collaboration between CHGS and the Center for Jewish Studies.

Using archival material and ethnographic interviews, Professor Boum argued that North African and Moroccan perspectives about the Holocaust are part of what he calls the durable structures of acceptance and minimization. Using Bourdieu's habitus, Boum claims that Moroccan debates about the Holocaust have been framed and ossified in a context of social and political pre-dispositions of minimization of the Holocaust generating typological and conflicting scripts. Therefore, when individuals go against the grain and question this habitus, they are perceived as going against the principles of regular continuity that has governed the Arab/Moroccan critique of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.

Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies
Thursday, May 9
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
710 Social Sciences

Eric Harkleroad will present "Warfare and Society: Archaeology's Contribution to the Discussion."

Eric's research focuses on situating warfare within the social sphere to examine its changing place in the daily life of Iron Age people in Southern Britain. His dissertation takes a regional look at how warfare, or the symbolic representations of warfare, is distributed across the landscape at different sites and how this changes through time. The work he is presenting uses a different scale focusing on one site and trying to understand how warfare fits into society at one specific site. Additionally he will address the relevance of Anthropology and Archaeology to the interests of the HGMV workshop.

This the last workshop of the 2012-2013 school year. The workshop will resume in September of 2013. For more information on how you can participate next year please email Alejandro Baer at abaer@umn.edu.

Special thanks to Shannon Golden for facilitating and organizing the workshops this year.

Registration for University of Minnesota's summer and fall semester is now open with a number of courses that fall within the Center's interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Holocaust and genocide.

Please register for the University of Minnesota Course offerings below at the One Stop Home Page.

For a complete list of potential courses click on the following link: Holocaust and Genocide Courses Offered at the University of Minnesota.pdf

The Holocaust in European Memory
July 8-11, 2013
Room 710 Social Sciences
9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Register here.
Registration deadline: June 24, 2013

In this workshop we will examine questions such as how the Nazi murder of European Jews became "The Holocaust"? How is this story conveyed through public memorials, school curricula, art, literature and film? How has the Holocaust been contextualized and rendered meaningful within the diversity of European nations and in the distant US? And what are its implications for teaching the Holocaust in the classroom?

We will approach the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective, with internationally recognized scholars in the fields of history, sociology, literature and German/European studies from the University of Minnesota and Gustavus Adolphus College. Speakers will focus on historiography, testimony, media and visual arts and will assist educators in creating curriculum and lessons they can incorporate into their classrooms.

Instructors:
Alejandro Baer,
Director and Stephen C. Feinstein Chair, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota
Leslie Morris, Associate Professor, Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch, University of Minnesota
Joachim J. Savelsberg, Professor Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota
Elizabeth Baer, Professor English, African Studies, Gustavus
Jodi Elowitz, Outreach Coordinator, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Department of History, are pleased to announce the Bernard and Fern Badzin Graduate Fellowship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies has been awarded to Wahuta Siguru.

Siguru's research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

Siguru was born and raised in Mombasa, Kenya and attended Moi University Law School from 2003-2007 and moved to Minnesota in 2007 completing a double major in Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2010.

He spent a year doing research with Professor Tade Okediji, (University of Minnesota Applied Economics) on ethnicity and ethnic group formation in Africa, which resulted in a co-authored paper presented at the 2013 Africa Conference in Austin Texas. The paper will also be presented at the African Studies Association Conference in Baltimore Maryland later this year.

Siguru began coursework towards a PhD in Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2011 and is currently analyzing data collected in the summer of 2012 in Johannesburg and Nairobi which has resulted in a co-authored paper with Professor Joachim Savelsberg on Representations of Darfur in Western and African Media; this will be presented at the 2013 American Sociological Association Conference in New York.

The Badzin Fellowship pays a living stipend of $18,000, and the cost of tuition, mandatory fees and health insurance. An applicant must be a current student in a Ph.D. program in the College of Liberal Arts, currently enrolled in the first, second, third, or fourth year of study, and have a doctoral dissertation project in Holocaust and genocide studies.

The fellowship is awarded on the basis of the quality and scholarly potential of the dissertation project, the applicant's quality of performance in the graduate program, and the applicant's general scholarly promise.

Alejandro Baer, CHGS will participate in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Symposium, Sephardic Jewry and the Holocaust: The Future of the Field
April 28-30, 2013
University of Washington, Seattle

The symposium is part of the year long commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Museum. Co-organized through the Sephardic Studies Initiative of the University of Washington's Samuel & Althea Stroum Jewish Studies Program and the Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, this symposium explores the unique history of Sephardic Jewry and the Holocaust.

Professor Baer will present The Voids of the Sephard: the Memory of the Holocaust in Spain.

Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies
Thursday, April 25:
3:30-5:00 p.m. 710 Social Sciences

"When Crimes Cannot Be Punished: the Comfort Women Issue and International Human Rights Law"

Hiromi Mizuno, Associate Professor, Department of History and CHGS advisory board member will present on her latest research.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop please contact Shannon Golden at golde118@umn.edu.

Remaining Workshop Schedule:

May 3: Friday, 12:00-1:30 p.m. (710 Social Sciences)
Courtney Gildersleeve

May 9: Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m. (710 Social Sciences)
Eric Harkleroad

The "Antifascist consensus" and the "club of political correctness." Addressing National Socialism in Austrian parliamentary debates on right-wing extremism
Interdisciplinary Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies
Thursday, April 11
3:30-5:00 p.m.
609 Social Sciences

Matthias Falter is political scientist and BMWF Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Austrian Studies of the University of Minnesota. His main fields of research are political theory, especially Critical Theory and the political thought of Hannah Arendt, historic and contemporary antisemitism, right-wing extremism and parliamentarianism. In his dissertation, Matthias Falter examines Austrian parliamentary discourse on right-wing extremism and underlying concepts of political community. On Thursday, he will talk about the memory of National Socialism as point of reference in contemporary Austrian parliamentary debates on right-wing extremism and the related struggles over politics of remembrance.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop please contact Shannon Golden at golde118@umn.edu.

Remaining Workshop Schedule:

April 25: Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m. (710 Social Sciences)
Hiromi Mizuno, "When Crimes Cannot Be Punished: the Comfort Women Issue and International Human Rights Law"

May 3: Friday, 12:00-1:30 p.m. (710 Social Sciences)
Courtney Gildersleeve

May 9: Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m. (710 Social Sciences)
Eric Harkleroad

Aomar Boum, Assistant Professor, School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Religious studies Program, University of Arizona
April 11, 2013
Room 1210 Heller Hall
5:30 p.m.

Since the end of WWII, the Holocaust has been a prominent issue in Arab political and intellectual discourse. Although this issue has largely played out in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, it has also been an integral part of the North African debate in general and the Moroccan anti-Israeli and Zionist discussions in particular by the early years of Independence.

Using archival material and ethnographic interviews, Professor Boum will argue that North African and Moroccan perspectives about the Holocaust are part of what he calls the durable structures of acceptance and minimization. Using Bourdieu's habitus, Boum claims that Moroccan debates about the Holocaust have been framed and ossified in a context of social and political pre-dispositions of minimization of the Holocaust generating typological and conflicting scripts. Therefore, when individuals go against the grain and question this habitus, they are perceived as going against the principles of regular continuity that has governed the Arab/Moroccan critique of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.

A group exhibition of student artwork on Holocaust remembrance organized by Kathy Carlisle, Visual Arts Instructor at St. Francis High School in Sacramento,California.

Exhibition Dates
April 2 - 13, 2013
Public Reception
Friday, April 12, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Quarter Gallery, Regis Center for Art
Gallery hours are 11 am to 7 pm, Tuesday through Saturday.

The project showcases the collective work of Photography One and Two students at St. Francis High School during the Spring semester, 2012. This conceptual photography assignment required students to engage in historical research about the Holocaust and to create symbolic photographic imagery in response to their research. An exploration of artists employing symbolism, metaphor, and allegory in historical and contemporary art established the foundation of the project. Students then began their work by expanding their knowledge of the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945 through personal and collaborative research and class assignments.

The students' creative challenges began as they refined their research to focus on a single personal narrative from a survivor or someone who had perished in the Holocaust. They were asked to personally assess and symbolize the essence of that single person's story through photographic imagery. Students were limited to a palette of sepia or black and white photography, using only tonal value to describe the depth and breadth of their concept. The final step of the project required students to write an artist's statement about their work, explaining their creative process and its connection to their research.