The Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is pleased to announce the 2013 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar for college and university faculty who are teaching or preparing to teach Holocaust or Holocaust-related courses. The 2013 seminar examines the history, memory, and memorialization of the Holocaust by analyzing the intent, form, content, and context—as well as change and continuity—of Holocaust representation.
Designed for faculty of all disciplines, the seminar will be held at the Museum from January 7–11, 2013, and will be led by James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor in English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and founding director of its Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.
Daily sessions will explore Holocaust remembrance, and the construction of memory in literature and visual representation, by surveying memorialization and educational efforts at sites of destruction, at monuments, and in museums.
Professor Young is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and books, including At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (2000); The Texture of Memory (1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award; and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award.
His articles and reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, New Literary History, Partisan Review, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Annales, SAQ, History and Theory, Harvard Design Magazine, Jewish Social Studies, Contemporary Literature, History and Memory, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Forward, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prooftexts, the Jewish Quarterly, Tikkun, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Slate, among dozens of other journals and collected volumes.
Professor Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate in 1997 to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was dedicated in 2005. He is currently completing an insider’s account of the World Trade Center memorial process, titled The Stages of Memory at Ground Zero: A Juror’s Report on the World Trade Center Memorial Process, which is based on his experience on the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. He is a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Academic Committee.
Seminar applicants must be faculty members of accredited, baccalaureate-awarding institutions in North America. Applications must include a curriculum vitae, a short statement of your specific interest in and need to attend the seminar, and a supporting letter from a departmental chair or dean detailing the Holocaust-related courses you are teaching or planning to teach as well as the support the university is providing for Holocaust studies at the institution. If you have already taught an applicable course, please include the course syllabus with your application.
The Center will accept a maximum of 20 applicants, without regard to age, gender, race, creed, or national origin. 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 participants 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 29, 2012. Please submit them 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
E-mail: university_programs@ushmm.org
For questions, contact Dr. Dieter Kuntz at 202.314.1779 or dkuntz@ushmm.org. The Center will notify accepted applicants of the results of the selection process by Monday, November 19, 2012.
The Jack and Anita Hess Faculty 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.
