blog posts

• Kevork Mourad and Helen Makdoumian visit the University of Illinois, April 24-25, 2023

  Apr 28, 2023 1:15 pm

  Kevork Mourad was born in Syria, studied art in Yerevan, Armenia, and now lives in upstate New York. His intensely evocative, beautiful work explores migration, memory, and place; trauma, community, and isolation. History and its often violent over-writing, the competing claims of inheritance and presence, the motherland and the currentland. Time, engagement, and distance. He collaborates with dancers, musicians, and other visual artists to create stunning multimedia projects. He has worked with Yo-Yo Ma, Kinan Azmeh, Kim Kashkashian, and exhibited and/or performed at Carnegie Hall, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tabari Art Space in Dubai, and many other august museums and performance spaces all over the world. 

  His projects invite us to see and feel the spaces he evokes but also to come in, to experience your own—our own—memories, reactions, and emotions as we travel through the work. As Kevork said in one of his many videos (and I urge you to check out his website which offers a vast archive of at least some of his myriad projects), “I’m interested in knowing what you’re going to feel when you are in front of the piece, as a citizen of the world.”

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  No. 4, Street of Our Lady: International Holocaust Remembrance Day Film Screening

  Jan 30, 2023 2:30 pm

  In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies screened the remarkable film No. 4, Street of Our Lady in a virtual event. The film tells the story of two Jewish families who were saved and hidden by Franciszka Halamajowa, a woman who risked her life to save them. We were joined after the screening by Judy Maltz, whose grandparents were saved at the house at No. 4, Street of Our Lady, and George Gasyna, who wrote the wonderful blog post below. The film is available for anyone to stream here: https://vimeo.com/80085717.

• I Want to Teach a Different Story About the Armenian Diaspora: A Reflection on Pedagogy

  Feb 6, 2023 11:30 am

  How might we train not just future scholars in the field of Armenian Studies, but instructors? As an inroad to addressing such open-ended questions, I offer this reflection on the course that I had the opportunity to design and teach as an Alex and Marie Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow through the Center for Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. If I were to answer my own question, I would say that I am committed to getting students to see a course like the one that I taught at the University of Michigan as not just a study of the Armenian Diaspora but a course that allows students to see how a particular case can prompt fascinating discussion on big questions. Specifically, I designed a semester-long undergraduate course titled “Armenian Relationality: Diasporas Old, New, and in the Making.” My course ran as a semester-long, 300-level undergraduate course through the Department of English Language and Literature and counted as an “Identity/Difference” course requirement for the undergraduate major.

• An interview with Dilara Çalışkan

  Mar 29, 2023 9:45 pm

  Dilara Çalışkan will earn her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UIUC in the Summer of 2023, writing a dissertation entitled: 'A Big Family of Bad Bad Bad Girls': Memory, Language, and Kin-Making Among Trans Women who do sex work in Istanbul,   under the direction of Jessica Greenberg and Jenny L. Davis. I [Brett] got to know Dilara because she has been an energetic, active member of the HGMS community. Between Fall 2018 and Spring 2021 Dilara was the co-organizer (with Claire Baytas) of the interdisciplinary reading group the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies.  She helped organize the annual HGMS graduate student conference for the past five years, she actively participated in the Mnemonics summer school, and she was a big part of the annual Armenian genocide commemorations, especially in 2017 for the Spaces of Remembering the Armenian Genocide Conference. Dilara also participated in the stellar collection Women Mobilizing Memory. 

• Race, Migration, Memory Symposium Schedule

  Nov 3, 2023 9:00 am

  This is the detailed schedule for the Race, Migration, Memory Symposium on November 3, 2023 at 210 Levis Faculty Center, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

• Welcome to Days and Memory, the HGMS blog!

  Dec 8, 2013 2:45 pm

  We are pleased to welcome you to Days and Memory, the blog of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. HGMS provides a platform for cutting-edge, comparative research, teaching, and public engagement related to genocide, trauma, and collective memory. We hope that this blog will serve as an opportunity to publicize and report on our local activities and to provide space for wide-ranging, open discussion of issues pertinent to genocide, trauma, and memory studies. The title of the blog is drawn from the brilliant Holocaust survivor and writer, Charlotte Delbo, whose book Days and Memory remains an innovative cornerstone of Holocaust literature.

• Living Memory with Corinna

  Oct 29, 2022 9:45 pm

  There are some thirty of us in Levis Faculty Center, sitting with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim and with memories and pictures of her grandparents. Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim was a German doctor drafted into World War I, four years on the Western Front, and then he left Europe as a ship’s doctor and a three-year resident of Sultanabad, what is now Arak, Iran. In October 1930 Hermann returned to Germany, unsure if there was a place for him there. He quickly fell in love with Käthe Stöver. Käthe had studied expressionist dance with the luminary Mary Wigman. Pictures show Käthe exuberant and joyous and sexy, playing with the camera’s eye; poised, kinetic, vivacious.