Karen Painter to visit Center for Advanced Genocide Research as 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellow Honorable Mention

Karen Painter, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities will be visiting the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research for one week this summer as Honorable Mention for the Center’s 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship. Professor Painter will be in residence at the Center July 23 – 27, 2018, during which time she will receive a deep introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and consult with Center and Institute staff to prepare to incorporate VHA testimonies into the curriculum of her freshman seminar “Music in Nazi Germany.”

The International Teaching Fellowship bestowed by the Center provides support for faculty at VHA access sites to integrate testimonies into new or existing courses.

Professor Painter has taught her freshman seminar course “Music in Nazi Germany” at University of Minnesota nine times. The course examines the role of music in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust and as a form of commemoration in other genocides. She plans to build class discussion around testimonies relevant to the course topics and to assign research to her students using the VHA. Students will select VHA testimonies to use as primary source material in their final assignment, a 10-page research paper that is worth half of the course grade.

Professor Painter, who earned her B.A. in music and philosophy at Yale University and her PhD in music from Columbia University, focuses her research on the relationship between music, listening and ideology in the context of 19^th century German social history, World War I, Austro-German socialism and Nazism. She has previously served as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts, and has held faculty appointments at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Professor Painter has held many fellowships, among them a Mellon Foundation summer research fellowship (1992), the Berlin Prize from the American Academy of Berlin (2000) and the 2014-15 visiting scholarship at the Harvard University Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

Professor Painter is the author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (2008) and Mahler and His World (2002), as well as the co-editor of three volumes. She is the author of over three dozen essays, journal articles and book reviews and contributions, and her work has been published in journals including Music & Politics, Musical Quarterly and 19^th Century Music. She has also delivered lectures at institutions around the globe, such as Freie Universität, Berlin, the Juilliard School, the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology and the Leo Baeck Institute. Professor Painter currently sits on the Advisory Board for the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Minnesota and is a Faculty Associate in the Department of Jewish Studies.