Sara Horowitz Named 2020-2021 Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Sara R. Horowitz, Professor of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at York University and an esteemed scholar of the Holocaust, has been named the 2020-2021 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will deliver a public lecture and spend over a week in residence at the Center in March 2022.

“We are excited to welcome Sara Horowitz, a world renowned Holocaust scholar. Drawing from her literary expertise, she will provide the Center’s work with survivor testimonies with rich new layers of analysis regarding gender and memory,” said Center Director Wolf Gruner.

Sara Horowitz has been a Professor in the Division of Humanities and Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University since 2002, and is a former director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. Prior to moving to Toronto, Professor Horowitz served as an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware, where she helped establish the Jewish Studies Program and served as its first director. Her academic training includes a Ph.D. in comparative literature (French, Hebrew, and English) and an M.A. in French literature from Brandeis University; an M.A. in English literature from Columbia University; and a B.A. in English literature, magna cum laude, from the City College of the City University of New York.

Sara Horowitz’s research focuses on Holocaust literature, women survivors, Jewish American fiction, and Israeli cinema. Currently, she is completing a book entitled Gender, Genocide and Jewish Memory, and co-editing a collection of essays on the image of Paris in post-war Jewish literary memory. She is the author of the award-winning Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (SUNY Press, 1997), which won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award. She was chief editor for the Azrieli Holocaust Memoirs Series, Series I and II (Azrieli Foundation-Centre for Jewish Studies 2007, 2009), which won an Independent Publisher Book Award and Freedom Fighter Category Gold Medal.. She is the editor or co-editor of many prizewinning books, including Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust X: Back to the Sources: Reexamining Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders (Northwestern University Press, 2012); H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (Northwestern University Press, 2016); and Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 1994).

Professor Horowitz has been the recipient of many research fellowships, awards, and accolades, including the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and on the Executive Committee for Jewish Literature of the Modern Language Association. She sits on the Academic Advisory Committee at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Intended to inspire prominent scholars, the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund enables one senior scholar to spend time in residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.  This prestigious fellowship is only available through an invitation by staff at the Center. The fellowship offers fellows the opportunity to use the Holocaust and genocide resources at USC, including the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which contains more than 55,000 testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, including the testimony of Sara Shapiro.

Professor Horowitz is the sixth Shapiro Scholar in Residence, following 2019-2020 Shapiro Scholar Peter Hayes, 2018-2019 Shapiro Scholar Marion Kaplan, 2017-2018 Shapiro Scholar Christopher R. Browning, 2016-2017 Shapiro Scholar Omer Bartov, and inaugural Shapiro Scholar David Cesarani, who passed away just weeks after being awarded the fellowship and for whom the USC Shoah Foundation hosted