NEW APPROACHES TO THE HOLOCAUST

Catalog description

Open to graduate students only. This seminar will examine a central discussion in Holocaust scholarship: the contextualization of the Holocaust as an integral part of genocide in the late modern world, particularly within the histories of colonialism and the emergence of the nation-state system, beginning in the late nineteenth century, on the ruins of the European empires. We will read mostly historians, but we will also see how approaches in law and social science enrich historical research. The focus in the readings on local and regional case studies will offer an opportunity to consider a turn to microhistories in Holocaust scholarship in the last decade, particularly how the small scales help us think big. Indeed, we will discuss new questions, research paths, and insights of integrated research on the Holocaust, and we will consider how it challenges and changes how we study the complex set of events and process that we call the Holocaust, what we know about them, how we teach them, and what they tell us about the world around us today. Faculty: R. Segal