memory & memorialization | representing trauma and war
presentation |seminar | previously | events| fellowship
We are very pleased to announce that one of our projects on Memory led by our member Denis PESCHANSKI (CNRS), in partnership with the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France), the Centre d'histoire du XXe siècle (CNRS, U. Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne), the Mémorial pour la Paix in Caen, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the WTC, has been rewarded a 2,7 Millions euros grant by the French Government ("Grand Emprunt" / "Major Loan" operation).
If you would like to know more about the war in ex-Yougoslavia, you may watch the remarkable documentary released in 1995 by BBC4 entitled "The Death of Yugoslavia". You can watch an excerpt by clicking on the following image:
LISTENING TO THE WOMEN OF BOSNIA: A SCREENING AND A BOOK PRESENTATION WITH SELMA LEYDESDORFF (Univ. Amsterdam / CNRS-NYU Senior Research Fellow)
with Selma LEYDESDORF (Prof., Univ. Amsterdam & CNRS/NYU). In the presence of Margaret WALLSTRÖM, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict at the UN & Mirsada COLAKOVIC, Deputy Representative, Permanent Mission of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the UN. Commenting: Peggy KUO, former Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Mohamed SACERBY, former minister and ambassador of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gregory STANTON (Prof., George Mason University), President of Genocide Watch, Pamela HOGAN, producer, PBS.
I CAME TO TESTIFY!
A SCREENING IN COLLABORATION WITH PBS, IN THE PRESENCE OF THE DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER PAMELA HOGAN
When the Balkans exploded into war in the 1990s, reports that tens of thousands of women were being systematically raped as a tactic of ethnic cleansing captured the international spotlight. I Came to Testify is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history's great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law.
Watch the full episode. See more Women War and Peace.
HISTORY AND MEMORY iN DIGITAL ARCHIVES: SCHOLARLY USES and MISUSES
A workshop organized by Selma LEYDESDORFF (Univ. Amsterdam / UMI Transitions) & Atina GROSSMANN (Cooper Union).
On May 6, the NYU/CNRS team working on the Memory and Memorialization progra will meet to discuss a critical evaluation of the large audio and visual data bases on the Holocaust that have been created over the last decades and the various initiatives to connect digitalized archives. While the assumption is that the work being done is important and enables future scholars to make use of these sources, the variety of storing, indexing, interviewing, interactions, and intersubjectivities involved is endless , and therefore we want to examine the ways we will be able to work with those archives in a scholarly way .
This discussion is an initiative of Atina Grossmann(Cooper Union) and Selma Leydesdorff (Amsterdam). The meeting is explicitly intended not as as a rehearsal of the many conferences on digitalization but is focused on the ways the archives can be used.
Program
Chair Marion Kaplan: Professor of Judaic Studies NYU Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History; Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
14.00 - 14.30 Noah Shenker on his ideas on libraries, archives, connections and storing
14.30-15.00 Denis Peschanski on his recent initiatives to connect archives . He will speak on his ideas around the Frenchproject : Memory Analysis Tools for Research through
International Cooperation and Experimentations. Between individual and social memory: needs and tools of innovation
15.00-15.20 Dori Laub What did you expect when you started the Fortunoff archive and how can people use it? He will speak on why he started this project, his ideas on the use by later generations.
15.20-15.40 questions and discussion chaired by Marion Kaplan
15.40- 16.10 break
16.10-16.30 Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Cooper Union.
16.30-16.45 Selma Leydesdorff on the ways she used the archive in order to work on her present Sobibor project.
"OCCUPATION, COLLABORATION, RESISTANCE: DOCUMENTARY PROPAGANDA FILMS MADE IN FRANCE". Screening of rare, newly restored, politically controversial shorts, made under Vichy Regime, with a presentation by ERIC LE ROY (Vice-President of the International Federation of Film Archives, and Senior Curator of the Archives françaises du film (CNC). Commenting: Denis Peschanski (CNRS). This event is free and open to the public.
For further details, please click here>
Co-sponsored by NYU Cinema Studies, La Maison Française, Remarque Institute, and NYU/CNRS Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (UMI 319“Transitions”)
NYU Tisch School of the Arts | Department of Cinema Studies| 721 Broadway | 6th Floor | Michelson Theater
February 17, 2010| 9:30 AM - 6:15 PM
IMPOSSIBLE NARRATIVES: HISTORICIZING MASS TRAUMA
*in collaboration with the Committee on Global Thought and The Middle East Institute of Columbia University
To listen to Carol GLUCK's conclusions, please use the player below:
To download the mp3 file or play the podcast on your Iphone, please click here>
Columbia University | Faculty House |Presidential Rooms 2 & 3
Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics & Society. A presentation of the book published in the series "Palgrave MacMillan Memory Studies" and edited by Yifat GUTMAN (Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research), Adam BROWN (Department of Psychiatry, NYU Medical School) & Amy SODARO (Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research). In presence of the editors and the authors: Daniel LEVY, Selma LEYDESDORFF (University of Amsterdam / CNRS NYU Memorial de Caen-Memory Fellow), Ross POOLE (Department of Political Science and Philosophy, New School for Social Research), Federico FINCHELSTEIN (Department of Historical Studies, New School for Social Research) & Ann SNITOW ( Literature and Gender Studies, Eugene Lang College). Commenting: Vera ZOLBERG (Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research), William HIRST, (Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research). Chair: Edward BERENSON (NYU and co-director of our center)| Memory Program.
To learn more about the book, click here...
org. Selma LEYDESDORFF (Amsterdam & CNRS NYU Mémorial de Caen Fellow).
Transitions UMI | 4 Washington Square North | 2d floor
Noah Shenker is the recipient of a Charles H. Revson Fellowship for Archival Research at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies within the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University in Hamiton, Ontario. He is currently completing work on his book entitled "Embodied Memory: The Formations of Holocaust Testimony." In 2009, he contributed a chapter drawing from selections of that research to the edited Routledge volume Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering.
His talk will address the myriad, often taken for granted ways that audiovisual testimonies, especially those of the Holocaust, are mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. It will emphasize that testimonies should not be understood as raw sources but as mediated and embodied texts shaped by the encounter between witnesses and their interviewers, as well as the institutional and technical practices marking the testimony process. Issues ranging from the depth and nature of interview questions, the framing and position of the camera, the personal encounter between interviewer and interviewee, the curatorial and programming preferences of the institutions in question, to name a few considerations, all impact how testimony is molded at the moment not only of production but also of distribution and reception. It is only by understanding their workings and contexts that scholars, students, and archivists can move beyond the monumental scope of these holdings and put them into constructive research, teaching, and social practice.
Denis PESCHANSKI, directeur de recherche at CNRS, Paris and affiliated to the Centre d’histoire sociale du XXe siècle (CNRS et Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). He is director of the Memory and Memorialization program. He is the author of several books and films on war memory. On April 2009, the research project he leads, with Edward Berenson (NYU), was awarded a 240 000 $ grant by PUF and FACE Foundations and a 2,7 millions euros grant by the Ministery of Research and Higher Education (Great loan/Grand Emprunt operation). The project associates NYU, the CNRS, the Mémorial de Caen and the US Foundation for the Museum and Memorial 9/11. He is president of the scientific council of Mémorial de Caen; president of the scientific council of Camp of Rivesaltes Memorial Museum, member of the Oradour Museum ethical committee. He recently received a major grant to research the possibilities of digitalizing and connecting archives on the Holocaust. While presenting the project he will talk about the ideas behind it.
Dori Laub is a practicing psychoanalyst, and is also the author of the major work on Narratives and Memory. Co-founder and Director, Holocaust Survivors’ Film Project New Haven, CT and Co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University.
Atina Grossmann has worked extensively with memoir, diary, and oral history sources in her research on Jewish experience and memory during and after World War II and the Shoah. Her current project, developed out of unanswered questions about the highly diverse wartime trajectories of the Jewish survivors discussed in her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007) focuses on “Transnational Jewish Refugee Stories: Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India as Sites of Relief and Refuge for European Jews during World War II.” She has not, however (so far!), used, video testimonies and is therefore all the more interested in the ways that accounts filmed and edited decades later both reveal and obfuscate the story of the survivors who provide them and the many more victims who cannot offer such witness. How will these clips of elderly women and men recounting traumatic memories of their youth appear to new generations of researchers, especially as we reach the proverbial biological limit of living memory of the Holocaust? How does the now standard international presentation of videotaped excerpts alongside other exhibits in Holocaust museums and memorial sites inform and distort our understanding of how the Final Solution unfolded and who is defined as a “survivor”? What is missing from this particular archive?
Atina Grossmann has worked extensively with memoir, diary, and oral history sources in her research on Jewish experience and memory during and after World War II and the Shoah. Her current project, developed out of unanswered questions about the highly diverse wartime trajectories of the Jewish survivors discussed in her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007) focuses on “Transnational Jewish Refugee Stories: Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India as Sites of Relief and Refuge for European Jews during World War II.” She has not, however (so far!), used, video testimonies and is therefore all the more interested in the ways that accounts filmed and edited decades later both reveal and obfuscate the story of the survivors who provide them and the many more victims who cannot offer such witness. How will these clips of elderly women and men recounting traumatic memories of their youth appear to new generations of researchers, especially as we reach the proverbial biological limit of living memory of the Holocaust? How does the now standard international presentation of videotaped excerpts alongside other exhibits in Holocaust museums and memorial sites inform and distort our understanding of how the Final Solution unfolded and who is defined as a “survivor”? What is missing from this particular archive?
Selma Leydesdorff is a well known oral historian, she is professor of Oral History and Culture in Amsterdam. She published widely on trauma interviews. At the moment her main work is on a project called “The long Shadow of Sobibor” for which she interviewed survivors and Co-plaintiffs around the present Demjanjuk trial. She has also worked extenstively on the genocide of Srebrenica (her book is forthcoming at Indiana Un. Press). At this moment she is visiting scholar at The Memory and Memorialization project NYU/CNRS.