The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is pleased to announce the 2012 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar for college/university faculty who are teaching or preparing to teach Holocaust or Holocaust-related courses. Utilizing the latest geographical information systems (GIS) technology, key readings, unique primary sources, and a hands-on mapping/visualization project, this year’s Hess Seminar introduces participants to the concepts and approaches to teaching about the Holocaust through geography in a variety of classroom contexts.
Designed for faculty of all disciplines, the Seminar will be held at the Museum from January 4–10, 2012, and will be co-led by Tim Cole, Department of History, University of Bristol, United Kingdom; and Anne Kelly Knowles, Department of Geography, Middlebury College, Vermont.
The Seminar will explore how the Holocaust created, changed, and destroyed places with particular meanings to those who inhabited them. Drawing on a range of primary sources and secondary literature, seminar participants will examine a number of Holocaust landscapes (forest, ghetto, rail, camp, attic, road) in order to reveal how perpetrators made and remade the European landscape, how victims experienced (and reshaped) these landscapes, what bystanders witnessed there, and these sites’ postwar histories of commemoration and erasure. Participants will also learn how to incorporate various kinds of geographical visualization into their own teaching about the Holocaust, including how to use historical maps in teaching and research, how to make simple maps, and how to use digital media to convey the geographic and spatio-temporal dimensions of the Holocaust to students and other audiences. The Seminar will include hands-on learning, with participants engaged in working with Holocaust-era documents to visualize this profoundly geographical event.
Dr. Tim Cole is Senior Lecturer in Social History at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. His two most recent volumes are Traces of the Holocaust. Journeying in and out of the Ghettos (2011) and Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (2003). His Holocaust research includes the implementation of the Holocaust in Hungary, particularly the spatiality of ghettoization and questions of gender and the Holocaust, and contemporary representations of the Holocaust, especially within memorial and museum space. During 1999-2000, he was the Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center, where he conducted research on “Ghettoization and the Hungarian Holocaust.”
Dr. Anne Kelly Knowles is Associate Professor of Geography at Middlebury College in Vermont. She is a leader in the development of historical GIS, the use of geographic information systems in historical research and teaching, as reflected in her volumes Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008) and Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002). She and Alberto Giordano are the Principal Investigators on the National Science Foundation grant that has chiefly supported the Holocaust Historical GIS Project, which led to this seminar. Her current book project, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, focuses on the relationship between labor, technology, and the geographic circumstances of production. Anne’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Candidates must be faculty members of accredited, baccalaureate-awarding institutions in North America. Applications must include a curriculum vitae, a short statement of the candidate's specific interest in and need to attend the Seminar, and a supporting letter from a departmental chair or dean detailing the Holocaust-related courses that the candidate is teaching or planning and the support that the university is providing for Holocaust studies at the institution. Applicants who have already taught courses on the Holocaust should include syllabi.
Admission will be decided without regard to the age, gender, race, creed, or national origin of the candidate. A maximum of 20 applicants will be accepted. For non-local participants, the Center will defray the cost of (1) direct travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and (2) lodging for the duration of the Seminar. Incidentals, meals, and book expenses must be defrayed by the candidates or their respective institutions. All participants must attend the entire Seminar.
Applications must be postmarked or received in electronic form no later than Monday, October 31, 2011 and sent to:
University Programs
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2150
Fax: (202) 479-9726
Email: university_programs@ushmm.org
For questions, contact Dr. Dieter Kuntz at 202-314-1779 or dkuntz@ushmm.org. Successful applicants will receive notification by Monday, November 21, 2011.
This Seminar is endowed by Edward and David Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita Hess, who believed passionately in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice.
