Cristina Villa, French and Italian:

Dr. Villa used her stipend to inaugurate a new fall course, “The Shoah in Italy and the Myth of the Good Italian.” Using Italian films, fiction, prose, and video testimony, Dr. Villa sought to challenge a commonly held Italian view of the Holocaust that casts Italians as anti-fascist philo-semites. She proceeded chronologically through the Holocaust from the pre-war to the post-war period, pairing later cultural artifacts with VHA testimonies to compare and contrast the memories of the survivors with the cultural memory conveyed through artistic views of those same events.

Judith Halberstam, English / American Studies & Ethnicity / Gender Studies:

Dr. Halberstam used the archive in one undergraduate and two graduate courses. In her graduate seminar titled “The Sociology of the Image”—which Halberstam co-taught with Professor Macarena Gomez-Barris—she examined “the function of visual culture in archiving experiences of trauma and terror…Our seminar, which contains a lengthy unit on the Holocaust, tracks the social life of images and examines the use of image data bases to record the seemingly unrepresentable accounts of survival and loss in the wake of political terror.”

Dr. Halberstam also taught a new undergraduate and graduate course titled “Representations of the Holocaust: Issues of Gender and Sexuality.” The course included a section on using the testimonies in the archive as source material for understanding the complexity of camp life in general, and the ways in which sexuality was used as a weapon against female inmates in particular.

Macarena Gomez-Barris, Sociology:

Dr. Gomez-Barris incorporated testimonies into two Spring 2009 Sociology courses: “Sociology of Violence” and “Visual Representations of Atrocity: the Holocaust and Latin American Experiences of State Terror.” The former course included a five-week segment that focused students’ attention on the aftermath of genocide, state violence, and atrocity. The latter focused on the methodology of visual testimony, using the Holocaust as a principal case study.

Colin Keaveney, French:

Dr. Keaveney utilized testimonies in his French 250 course, “Paris as Seen by Writers, Filmmakers, and Photographers” (Fall 2008, Spring 2009). A central course text, Dora Bruder, explores coincidences between lives and events in Paris through the 20th century; Dr. Keaveney assigned SFI testimonies that mirrored the experiences discussed in Dora Bruder—roundups of French Jews in early 1942, internment in Drancy and Tourelles in 1942 and 1943, etc.

Beth Meyerowitz, Psychology:

Dr. Meyerowitz’s Spring 2009 course “Psychological Adjustment Following Traumatic Life Events: the Case of Genocide” provided students with a theoretical framework within which to evaluate the effects of trauma using specific case studies from the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust. Dr. Meyerowitz assigned testimonies to help students develop and answer research questions.

Vanessa Schwartz, History:

Dr. Schwartz incorporated SFI testimonies into two courses: “Advanced Research in Modernity and Visual Culture” (Fall 2008), and “Society and Culture in Modern France” (Spring 2009). In “Advanced Research in Modernity and Visual Culture,” Schwartz developed a unit dedicated to studying SFI testimonies from the perspective of “visual history” and “visually-oriented indexing.” In “Society and Culture in Modern France” (subsequently renamed “France and the French from Napoleon to Mitterand”), Schwarz showed testimonies relating to the French Exodus and liberation of Paris. She also discussed the memorialization of World War II in France through the particular case study of the Paris Mémorial de la Shoah, where a collection of the Institute’s testimonies is housed.