Center for Advanced Genocide Research to Participate in Lessons and Legacies XIV Conference

The 14th biannual Lessons and Legacies Conference, a conference on Holocaust studies sponsored by Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and Claremont McKenna College, will take place Nov. 3-6, 2016. It will bring together 250 of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars including several USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff and collaborators.

Wolf Gruner, director of the Center, is co-chairing the conference along with Hilary Earl of Nipissing University. The conference is co-hosted by Jonathan Petropoulos and Wendy Lower of Claremont McKenna College. Lower was the 2015 Yom HaShoah Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation and has lectured at USC several times about her research of female perpetrators of the Holocaust. Lower was also on the steering committee of the 2014 USC Shoah Foundation conference “Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List.”

The theme of this year’s Lessons and Legacies conference, Nov. 3-6 at Claremont McKenna in Southern California, is “The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age.” It has gathered scholars from around the world, including the United States, Germany, Israel, Australia, Poland, Chile, Canada, the Netherlands and the UK to share their research. Topics include digital and non-digital research methods, Holocaust pedagogy, the future of survivor testimony and new discoveries about Holocaust history.

Stephen Smith, executive director of USC Shoah Foundation, will speak on a panel about “The Holocaust in the Digital Age.” The panel is chaired by University of Bristol’s Tim Cole, who has done extensive research in the Visual History Archive as part of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, a multidisciplinary research group that uses GIS mapping to study the Holocaust.

In addition, Center staff Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Gruner, and Crispin Brooks will lead workshops for the conference scholars at the USC Shoah Foundation office on how they can use the Visual History Archive in their research. The two workshops will be held immediately before and after the conference and will be attended by two dozen scholars. Center staff will also host a booth throughout the conference for scholars to drop by at any time and learn more about the VHA , the Center, or ask specific questions about their research.

Other scholars who will present at the conference that have collaborated with USC Shoah Foundation in the past, as fellows, visiting lecturers, partners or researchers, are: Atina Grossman (The Cooper Union), Michael Renov (USC), Hannah Pollin-Galay (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Dienke Hondius (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Anne Frank House), Todd Presner and Jared McBride (UCLA), Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine), Paul Jaskot (DePaul University), Alberto Giordano (Texas State University), Dan Stone and Simone Gigliotti (Royal Holloway, University of London), Peter Hayes (Northwestern University), Maximilian Strnad (University of Munich), Alejandro Baer (University of Minnesota) and Henry Greenspan (University of Michigan).