2007 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar:
Literature and the Holocaust

January 3-9, 2007

The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum announces the 2007 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar on Literature and the Holocaust. This year’s seminar is designed for professors who are teaching or preparing to teach English, Jewish Studies, Literature, or other courses that have a Holocaust-related literature component.

The seminar is scheduled for January 3-9, 2007, and will be team-taught by David G. Roskies, Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor and Chair of Jewish Literature and Culture at The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York; and Sara R. Horowitz, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies, and Professor of Humanities and English, at York University, Toronto, Ontario. Professor Roskies, an expert in the field of Eastern European Jewry, teaches interdisciplinary courses ranging from topics such as “Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Yiddish Literature” to “Images of the Shtetl.” He is the author of seven books, including The Literature of Destruction and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize-winning work Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. He serves as editor-in-chief of the New Yiddish Library, published by Yale University Press, and co-founded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History in 1981 and has been its co-editor for twenty-five years. In 2007 he will be the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Professor Horowitz is a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and Vice-President of the Association for Jewish Studies. She authored Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, winner of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and co-edited the award-winning Jewish American Women Writers and Encounters with Appelfeld. She serves as co-editor of the journal Kerem: Creative Explorations in Judaism. Her research focus and teaching expertise includes “Literary Responses to the Holocaust,” “Gender and the Holocaust” and “Narrative and Jewish Culture.”

The seminar will comprise daily sessions of lectures and discussions of the principle works, latest approaches, newest techniques, and key pedagogical issues in the field; the use of Holocaust-related fiction and poetry in university-level courses; the ways in which the history and memory of the Holocaust are transmitted in literature; public reception of those transmissions; the relationship between oral testimony and literature; Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust by victims and survivors; and use of literature to confront the emotional trauma left behind after genocide.

Candidates must be faculty members of accredited, degree-awarding institutions (baccalaureate, the equivalent, or higher) in North America. Applications must include a curriculum vitae, a short statement of the candidate’s specific interest in attending the seminar, and a supporting letter from a departmental chair or dean, detailing the Holocaust-related courses that the candidate is teaching or planning and the support that the university is either providing or making available for Holocaust studies at their institution. If the applicant has already taught an applicable course, a syllabus should also be included.

Admission will be decided without regard to the age, gender, race, creed, or national origin of the candidate. A maximum of twenty applicants will be accepted. For non-local participants, the Center will defray the cost of (1) direct travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and (2) lodging for the duration of the course. Incidental, meal, and book expenses must be defrayed by the candidates or their respective institutions. All participants must attend the entire seminar. There will also be opportunities to explore the Museum's significant library, archival, film, and photo holdings.

Applications must be postmarked or received in electronic form no later than Monday, October 16, 2006 and sent to:

University Programs
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2150

Fax: (202) 479-9726
Email: dkuntz@ushmm.org

For questions, contact Dr. Dieter Kuntz at: 202-314-1779 or dkuntz@ushmm.org All applicants will be notified of the results of the selection process by Friday, November 3, 2006.

This seminar has been endowed by Edward and David Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita Hess, who believed passionately in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice.