The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) was founded in 2009 by Michael Rothberg and a group of scholars including Peter Fritzsche, Anke Pinkert, and Brett Ashley Kaplan. The idea was to bring together research across the University of Illinois campus in comparative genocide issues. Since 2016, Brett Kaplan has directed the program. The current HGMS affiliated faculty work on questions of trauma and memory in the contexts of the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, and other geographic and historical sites. We host a vibrant HGMS faculty series that offered an opportunity for UIUC scholars and guest visiting scholars such as Ariella Azoulay to share ideas across the range of disciplinary, theoretical, geographical, and historical span of memory studies. Each spring we host two major events: an interdisciplinary graduate student conference for UIUC and UCLA graduate students, and an event that discusses some aspect of Armenian culture, history, literature, art on or around the annual commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, April 24th. HGMS maintains an active blog entitled (after the brilliant Holocaust survivor and writer Charlotte Delbo’s work) Days and Memory. HGMS has become a vibrant center of intellectual exchange on this campus and connects with many memory scholars around the world.
See what students and faculty have to say about HGMS.
HGMS is profoundly committed to fostering graduate student education and to that end we have several projects ongoing. We organize many events to benefit the campus and off-campus communities; we have been able to produce a huge number of wonderful conferences, lectures, roundtables etc. on either a shoestring budget or with funds raised externally.
A wonderful Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group organized by HGMS students fosters intellectual exchange between students and faculty from English, Comparative Literature, French, Art History, Library Sciences, German, and other programs and departments.
HGMS is affiliated with Mnemonics, an international summer school that holds a scintillating annual conference. Each year we send one HGMS student to the conference. We hosted the Mnemonics summer school in the summer of 2016 and it was thrilling to welcome graduate students and faculty from all over the world to discuss ideas at the cutting edge of memory studies.
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Professor Melissa Bilal of the American University of Armenia will provide an introduction to Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive, a collaborative project with Lerna…
Professor Fritzsche is in the History department here at UIUC and is the author of numerous books including Life and Death in the Third Reich and Germans into Nazis. For this workshop, he spoke about…
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To honor former Comparative Literature and Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies PhD student, Okla Elliott, who passed away unexpectedly in 2017. After graduating from UIUC, Okla went on to become…
Mnemonics Summer School 2016 June 2-4 Organized by Brett Kaplan and Michael Rothberg University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign All lectures and panels take place at the Illinois Program for…
Film screening of The Destruction of Memory and Q & A with the filmmaker, Tim Slade, via Skype. Location: English Building, Room 304 Date: 10/9/2017, 5:00 pm HGMS Days and Memory blog post…
The following courses are pre-approved for the Jewish Studies major and minor. (400- and 500-level courses listed here may be used towards the completion of the Jewish Studies graduate certificate.)
