von Mittwoch, 29. November 2023 -  08:00
bis Freitag, 1. März 2024 - 23:59

Course date: 10–19 July 2024
Location: Budapest

Application deadline: 1 March 2024
ECTS Credits: 2.0
Course delivery: In-person

This 9-day, 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, and film screenings. 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 digitisation 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 of 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.

Eligibility

The program encourages applications from students in multiple disciplines at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, as well as early career oral history and digital humanities scholars and practitioners interested in learning more about the genealogy and impact of Holocaust testimony as a genre. We also invite applications from advanced undergraduate students who have adequate prior study or engagement experience on the subject and make a compelling case in their application/statement of interest.
There are no prerequisites, but the participants should be doing research on a topic related to the themes of the course.

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 University)
Avinoam Patt (Center for Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut)
Noah Shenker (University Studies, Colgate University)

Further information: https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/courses/2024/holocaust-testimonies-and-their-afterlives
Co-funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN).