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Meeting National Seminar in Oral History – How to use deposited archives? Problems and Questions

How to use deposited archives? Problems and Questions

Huizinga Institute / National Seminar in Oral History

It is our pleasure to invite you to our next meeting on May 27 at 15.00 hrs. The Seminar in Oral History was focused on a major grant recently, but now we want to make a fresh restart. Please feel free to spread this invitation.

Date: May 27, 2016
Time: 15.00 -17.00 hrs (followed by drinks)
Guest speaker: Dawn Skorczewski (Brandeis University)
Co referee: Selma Leydesdorff (UvA)
Chair: Nanci Adler (NIOD, UvA)
Venue: NIOD, Herengracht 380, 1016 CJ Amsterdam (NL)
We kindly ask you to register via Huizinga-fgw@uva.nl, because there is limited space.

We are happy to announce that professor Dawn Skorczewski will be our guest speaker:

Silences in the Archive: Revisiting the Question of Holocaust Memory

Abstract
It has become commonplace to speak of the silences that haunt the work of Holocaust testimony and memory. But when does silence act in the service of a survivor’s agency? This presenter will consider the relatively unexamined and delicate power balance in encounters between witnesses and the interviewers in the USC Shoah Foundation digitized archive. Skorczewski shows clips from the archive to call attention to what still cannot be said within and about women’s experiences of being objectified and abused. She will focus in on Dutch women’s attempts to move out of the “victim” position when narrating sexual abuse in hiding and in the camps. One survivor, when asked, “what was that like for you?” looks her interviewer in the eye and says “well, Yeah.” and moves on. Her silence illustrates when speaking is not actually freeing, in contradiction to so much of the standard literature on testimony.

Bio
Dawn Skorczewski is Professor of English and Director of University Writing at Brandeis University, where she teaches courses including Writing the Holocaust and The International Legacy of Anne Frank. She was the 2013 Fulbright Professor of American Culture at VU Amsterdam. She is the author of Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom (U Mass Press 2005), and An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton (Routledge 2012).  She won the Gondor award for her contributions to psychoanalytic education. Her articles on the Holocaust include “Talking Around the Holocaust: The Interviewer’s Role” (Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego Volume 1/2014). She is working on Are You Jewish?: A Holocaust Education in Amsterdam.