Holocaust Testimonies and Their Afterlives

This two-week, 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, film screenings, and even a concert. 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.