Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies

Center to Host Online Programs with Dr. Noah Shenker (Monash University, Australia) on the Future of Holocaust Testimony (April 8)

The Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies invites the public to an online lecture by Dr. Noah Shenker (Monash University) live from Australia. Dr. Shenker's public talk is entitled "Beyond the Era of the Witness:  Testimony, Digital Media, and the Afterlives of Holocaust Memory" and will take place on Thurs., April 8, from 7:00 - 9:00 pm EST. The event is also part of this year's Center programming for Yom HaShoah, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. To register for this public lecture, please click here.

Dr. Noah Shenker is the N. Milgrom and 6a Foundation Senior Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.  He holds a PhD in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Dr. Shenker's research and teaching traverse Jewish Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Cultural Studies, and Cinema and Media Studies. That interdisciplinary approach was at the center of his first book, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, published in 2015 by Indiana University Press as part of its Modern Jewish Experience series.  Organized within a comparative framework, his book looks at three of the most extensive and distinctive archives of Holocaust testimony in the world:  the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Dr. Shenker investigates how the cultural and institutional histories and practices of those sites mediate the encounters between interviewers and interviewees and consider the extent to which testimonies are driven by the agency of witnesses and the itineraries of a given archive. In addition, he has written and published extensively on the representation of the Holocaust and genocide in testimony, film, and new media.  His contributions include “’I have never begun by asking the big questions’: Raul Hilberg as Historical Revenant in Shoah,” in the edited volume, The Invention of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and “Through the Lens of the Shoah:  The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies,” in History & Memory (2016). His current project (with co-author Associate Professor Dan Leopard) on which the talk is based -- and which is a parallel project to a joint research endeavor of the Holocaust Program at Western Galilee College, the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, and ASU's Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies -- explores Holocaust testimony beyond the "Era of the Witness" (A. Wieviorka).

Organized by the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the program is co-sponsored by ASU's Department of History. To register for this research colloquium, please click here.

Like all Center events, these online programs are free of charge and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Center at 828.262.2311 or holocaust@appstate.edu.