Welcome to the Fall 2024 Academic Year! The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is looking forward to an engaging line up of events---see below for future plans and a report on the 2023-24 year!
Upcoming Events
Samuel Freedman, Professor of Journalism at Columbia, will offer the Jewish Studies and HGMS kick-off event at 5pm on September 11th in 210 Levis: “Fighting Hatred in the Heartland: Hubert Humphreys Battle Against Extremism in Mid-Century America.” Sam was the leader of an amazing workshop in New York last summer, sponsored by the Association for Jewish Studies, which invited a group of faculty to think about Writing Beyond the Academy.
Then for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27th, 2025 (at the suggestion of Frances Harris), Zisl Sleplovitch will present Songs from Testimonies which incorporates survivor recordings with an accompanying musical legacy. This combination of testimony and music, Harris says, “vividly reflects the diversity, nuance, and color of the lives that were lost during a terrible period in human history. The music speaks to freedom, life, and community, and draws upon Yiddish, Polish, and French melodies.”
Then, on February 12th at noon in 109 English, we’ll launch HGMS and German Professor Anke Pinkert’s brilliant new book, Remembering 1989, which is due out with University of Chicago Press in October. I’ve had the opportunity to read parts of this book and it’s a powerful exploration of 1989, the wall coming down, and all the aftereffects of this in personal and archival memories.
On Friday, March 28th, we’ll host the annual HGMS graduate student conference in Levis 210 from 9am-5pm. Confirmed keynote speaker (at the suggestion of Ragini Chakraborty) Dr. Rituparna Roy will discuss the important work she has been doing on the Virtual Kolkata Partition Museum.
We plan to close out the year’s programming on April 24th with a visit from photographers Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian who have documented the oral histories and images of survivors of the Armenian genocide. This will be a two-part art exhibit at the Art Gallery in the Illini Union from April 10-May 31, with an opening reception on April 25th at 4pm. The second part will be large scale fabric photographs hung at the Siebel Design Center in the spring and culminating in a moderated talk with Ara, Levon, and me at 5pm on April 24th (the annual day of commemoration of the Armenian Genocide) at the Siebel Center. You can learn more about their amazing project here.
2023-24 Events
The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies (HGMS) has completed an active year of programs and events which have engaged students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, faculty, and the community to discuss and learn about a wide range of issues in memory studies. We began the year with a brilliant pair of events: on November 3, Professor of French at UC Berkeley, Debarati Sanyal, kicked off the Race, Migration, and Memory conference with a keynote entitled: “Arts of the Border: Kino-Aesthetic Movement and Mobilization.” Sanyal described the project thusly: “Refugees encounter borders in an immediate and embodied experience, yet this encounter is informed by and expressed through circulating representations, histories and collective memories. Their confrontation with territorial borders is at once experiential, aesthetic and expressive. Aesthetics, in its broadest definition, includes what is seen and sensed; it is a practice of memory, survival and imagination that intertwines life and art. With the alliance of artistic representations, refugees create an art of memory, mobility and mobilization. My talk examines literary and cinematic portrayals of border crossing at Europe's outer edges through the notion of ‘kino-aesthetics.’” It was a wonderful talk, full of profoundly moving images of refugees and migrants navigating impossible situations and it set up the conference. This was the second collaboration with our partners from the University of Birmingham, Sara Jones and Mónica Jato, with whom I applied for and received a grant from BRIDGE. I invited a very broad group of graduate students and faculty to give “lighting talks” throughout the day so that many different voices, nations, perspectives, and ideas about Race, Migration, and Memory could be seen and heard. A graduate student in my whales and literature seminar, MacKenzie Guthrie, wrote a truly inspired, very beautifully crafted essay about the conference which you can read on our blog, Days and Memory.
On November 9th, as our event on the occasion of Kristallnacht, I hosted Professor Hans Ruin from, Södertörn University (Stockholm, philosophy), who presented “Memory, History and the Care for the Dead.” Zoom allows for such geographic flexibility—I hosted Hans from North Carolina, and it was a hybrid event with participants from UNC and Duke in person and, via zoom, participants from UIUC and many other places in the world. Both the in person and virtual audiences were very engaged with the talk, based around Hans’s brilliant book, Being with the Dead. Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness (Standford UP, 2019). Hans described the talk thusly: “It reconnects to Michel de Certeau’s famous argument that historiography constitutes a cesura regarding the dead, as compared to older cultures of memory that preserve a living relation to the dead. The argument is that this definitive distinction between the work of memory and historiography disregards the deeper liaison between them, and the ways in which historiography can also be interpreted as a kind of sublimated mortuary culture.” Hans and I are both part of the vibrant, international Mnemonics network and Hans hosted the annual conference in Sigtuna in 2022. This was a wonderful Mnemonics with students from many parts of the world including HGMS graduate student Ragini Chakraborty who presented material from her brilliant dissertation in the making.
On January 19th, we launched Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches, a wide-ranging anthology I edited which was published by Bloomsbury in May 2023. Several of the contributors gave lightning talks via zoom from all over the world and it was an occasion to celebrate the book! Unfortunately, the video of the event was not saved, we are very sad about this, but stuff happens. We’ve just found out from Bloomsbury that the anthology will be out in paperback!
For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Susanne Belovari, Associate Professor and Archivist for Faculty Papers, spoke about her research into Vienna’s cookbooks which were written by and for Jews and non-Jews. Here is how she described the talk: “Unknown today… is the fact that the famous Viennese cuisine was a shared cuisine until 1938: Jews and nonJews had long met through food and foodways and together created and enjoyed what became the internationally famous Viennese Cuisine. …Tellingly, the National Socialists not only aryanized gastronomy and food industries but even a famous cookbook by a Viennese Jewish author. To track Vienna's extensive and collaborative culinary relationships since the 1700s, the usual sources (cookbooks, recipes, and oral histories) were not enough. Materials had to be drawn from a diversity of fields: literature, poetry, children’s rhymes, movies, musical compositions, and radio broadcasts; popular, even antisemitic portrayals in newspapers, the arts, and exhibitions; patents; food industry documents and illustrations; publications by city institutions; medical and ‘race science’ literature; and Holocaust restitution and genealogical records, among others. Some sources had to be read against the grain to locate absences, changes in terminology, and indexing in order to reveal how - as a Holocaust survivor put it - the ‘Viennese cuisine was the product of both Jewish and non-Jewish experts[and the general population], crossing the divide of antisemitism.’”
This was a fascinating hybrid talk, Susanne zoomed in from Vienna and showed many fascinating archival images of cookbooks and other demonstrations of this shared cuisine.
On February 12th we were treated to a joint HGMS and Jewish Studies workshop with David Wright Faladé, Professor of English at UIUC, who presented his forthcoming novel. At the time of the workshop the title was “What is Hidden Cannot be Loved,” but it has been changed to The New Internationals and is forthcoming from Grove Press, 2025. “What Is Hidden Cannot Be Loved explores betrayal, loss, and our modern cultural stew. Inspired by the thirty-year correspondence between my mother and my grandmother, Jews who survived the Nazi occupation of France, the novel tells the story of an unlikely love triangle—between a Holocaust survivor, a Sorbonne student from colonial West Africa, and a black GI—set during the tumult and renewal of post-World War II Paris. What Is Hidden Cannot Be Loved moves from the seventeenth-century Slave Coast to occupied Paris to Civil Rights-era Kansas and investigates the blurring, deliberate as well as unexpected, of cultural, racial and religious lines.” This was a wonderful presentation and particularly gratifying for me because I’d heard about this novel in an earlier form and talked at length with David during a long, rambling, riveting, interview which will be included in my co-edited collection, And Beautiful: Contemporary Black-Jewish Voices (co-edited with Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell and Sara Feldman).
One of the all-time highlights of my career was the visit from Ben Lerner on April 4th. This visit would not have happened without the generous support of Deborah Lynch, and we are truly grateful to her for the Greenfield-Lynch lecture series which has brought Nicole Krauss, Sarah Phillips Casteel, Steve Zipperstein, and others to campus. For the 2026 Greenfield-Lynch lecture series we hope to bring a panel of speakers to share their stories of being Black and Jewish and navigating this complex identity.
Ben Lerner is the author of several novels and poetry collections including Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, The Topeka School, The Lights, and other works. A lovely sense of anticipation and enthusiasm pervaded campus in advance of his visit with many faculty and students familiar with his work and looking forward to engaging. A couple of weeks before he arrived, I led a sort of “book club” conversation about The Topeka School. And of course I was reading all of his novels carefully and trying to come up with juicy questions to ask! I’d let Ben choose whether, for his big event, he wanted to do a reading or a conversation and he picked the latter. Before the evening event at Levis he had lunch with a group of MFA students in the seminar room in Jewish Studies. This was a wide-ranging discussion wherein he talked about his writing novels as emerging from poetry, which is, he’d said, always how he thought. We also talked about Jewishness in his work which, he confessed, “is everywhere and nowhere.” For the evening event, the Levis 210 room was nearly completely full. Ben began by reading some poems from his newest collection, The Lights and then I asked him several questions and the audience followed with brilliant, thoughtful interactions. The whole evening can be seen here. I am working on getting some blog posts about this amazing visit posted on Days and Memory. Stay tuned!
We concluded our annual programming with S.L Wisenberg’s Yom HaShoah presentation of her Juniper Prize winning book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home. Sandi read from parts of the book and then we had a discussion that ranged from Holocaust AI projects such as holograms to monuments, memorials, and museums. We also talked about the diversity of forms in which Sandi engages: she’s an editor of Another Chicago Magazine and is the author of Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions, as well as The Adventures of a Cancer Bitch. We are extremely grateful to Women and Gender in Global Perspectives for sponsoring this workshop!
I am delighted to report that three graduate students in Comparative and World Literature have re-started the Future of Trauma and Memory Reading Studies group. Ragini Chakraborty, Matthew Fam, and Ann Pei led the group with a series of wonderful essays. I was only able to attend once (and caught the tail end of the final meeting, pictured here), but when I participated in the conversation about spectrality, I was deeply impressed with the level of engagement with a series of texts that the students had chosen. I look forward to seeing how this group evolves next year.
The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies (HGMS) organized this wide-ranging series of events with support and sponsorship from Women and Gender in Global Perspectives (WGGP), The Greenfield-Lynch Lecture Series, The Department of Comparative and World Literature, American Indian Studies program, the Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement and Education (BRIDGE) program, the Humanities Research Institute (HRI), the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics (SLCL), the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (REEEC), the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (CSAMES), the Center for Advanced Study (CAS), and, our main supporter, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society.
I wanted to close with this broad coalition to showcase how HGMS reaches a very wide swath of programs on this campus and how we are deepening our connections through BRIDGE to the University of Birmingham. I also participated in a multinational conference on memorials and museums through our partnership with Kyushu University (I am grateful to Colleen Murphy, WGGP director, for spearheading this collaboration).
2023-2024 Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies Events
November 2, 2023: Debarti Sanyal lecture, 5pm, 210 Levis
“Arts of the Border: Kino-Aesthetics and the Movement of Refugees”
Krouse Family Visiting Scholars in Judaism and Western Culture Fund
Keynote to BRIDGE conference, Race, Migration, and Memory
November 3, 2023: 9am-5pm BRIDGE conference Race, Memory Migration. Levis 210
Keynote Shimon Attie: “Night Watch and Other Projects” https://jewishculture.illinois.edu/news/2023-10-23/race-migration-memory-symposium
November 9, 2023: noon, Hans Ruin “Memory, History, and Care for the Dead” on the occasion of Kristallnacht/November Pogrom Commemoration (zoom)
January 19th, 2024: Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches, book launch
January 29, 2024: International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Susanne Belovari, University Archivist, “Jews and non-Jews Creating the famous Viennese Cuisine: Shared Food and Foodways from the late 1700s to 1938,” noon 109 English and via zoom
February 12th, 2024: 4pm, 109 English, David Wright Faladé “What is Hidden Cannot be Loved”–presentation of novel in progress to Jewish Studies and HGMS Workshop
April 4th, 2024: 5:30pm, Ben Lerner, Greenfield Lynch, Jewish Studies, English, and HGMS lecture, Levis 210
April 30, Yom HaShoah Event, “The Wandering Womb” with Sandi Wisenberg, noon 109 English (co-sponsored with Women and Gender in Global Perspectives)
