June 15-17, 2011
Middelburg, The Netherlands

Call for Papers

The Netherlands American Studies Association and the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association co-organize an international conference titled American Responses to the Holocaust: Transatlantic Perspectives, to be held at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands, June 15-17, 2011.

The conference aims to explore American responses to the Holocaust and the ways in which the systematic destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War has figured in American politics, in important cultural and social debates in the United States, in American literature and popular culture, and in other aspects of American life, such as religion, education, and jurisprudence. The organizers encourage contributions from scholars interested in the United States and the Holocaust from as diverse a range of disciplines as possible, including history, historiography, the social sciences, cultural studies, literary studies, museum studies, gender studies, religious studies, memory studies, ethics, and law. We encourage multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic, which we hope will bring a new American studies perspective to what has traditionally been the focus of Jewish Studies and Holocaust studies. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the responses to the Holocaust from a transatlantic perspective in the belief that a comparative approach that takes into account the similarities and differences between responses in Europe and the United States is useful and enlightening for American studies scholars and can contribute new and valuable insights into the ways in which the Holocaust has figured in American life.

We hope to explore how American responses to the Holocaust contradicted, provoked, or changed European reactions. The following are just some of the themes that conference papers could address: government responses to the Holocaust during and right after World War II; the effects of the Holocaust on foreign policy toward Israel and intervention elsewhere in the world since World War II; responses to the Holocaust in fiction and other arts, and in popular culture, such as film and television; post-memory and second-generation experience as reflected in literature and other art forms; museums and Holocaust memorials as expressions or embodiments of public memory of the Holocaust; debates on the use of the term Holocaust and their implications for memory of the Shoah; legal responses to Holocaust denial and revisionism; theological responses to the Holocaust within Judaism and other religions; the role of education in remembering the Holocaust and the place of the Holocaust in the curriculum; the emergence of (comparative) genocide studies in the wake of Holocaust studies; and any other aspects of American life in which effects of the Holocaust are present, either explicitly or implicitly.

The conference organizers are Gert Buelens (Ghent University), Hans Krabbendam (Roosevelt Study Center), and Derek Rubin (Utrecht University).
A selection of the papers will serve as the basis for a thematically coherent collection of essays to be submitted for possible publication in the Amsterdam University Press series New Debates in American Studies.
Those interested in presenting a paper are kindly requested to submit a one-page proposal for a 20-minute presentation and a brief curriculum vitae before December 1, 2010 to Hans Krabbendam jl.krabbendam@zeeland.nl .
Please note that conference participants are expected to cover their own travel and hotel expenses.