Welcome Remarks / Introductory Panel

Welcome Remarks

Wolf Gruner, Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation

Introductory Panel

Chair: Lyn Boyd-Judson, Global Humanities and Ethics, USC

• Todd Presner (UCLA, Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies)
  “Digital Humanities and Holocaust Studies: Challenges and Possibilities”

• Alina Bothe (Freie Universität Berlin/Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, History)
  “Limits of Representation? Ethics of Digital Shoah History”

Todd Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Since 2011, he is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He is also the Chair of the Digital Humanities Program and faculty co-PI on the “Urban Humanities” initiative at UCLA. His research focuses on European intellectual history, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. His books include: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014), with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano, and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016), co-edited with Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu. His current research project is called “The Ethics of the Algorithm” and examines the nexus (and tension) between computation and ethics.

Alina Bothe studied History, Politics and Eastern European History at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2012 to 2015 she was a research fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis about the “digital turn” in Shoah memory, focusing on the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Her research fields among others include Digital Humanities, Gender Studies, Shoah History and Conceptual History. She has published volumes on testimony, gender and digital media and edited a Special Issue of the Leo Baeck Yearbook about a conceptual history of the term survivor. Her postdoc research (Habilitation/second book) deals with the deportation of Polish Jews from the German Reich between October 1938 and September 1939. For this project she has been awarded the postdoc fellowship of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. She is currently curating an exhibition about the expulsion from Berlin in October 1938, to be opened in June 2018 at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. For part of this project she received the USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching Fellowship.

Originally from Germany, Wolf Gruner is a specialist for the research of the Holocaust and Central European Jewish history, topics on which he published ten books and around 70 articles and book chapters by now. Most recently, he published a prizewinning book on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. He just finished an exciting decade-long research project on forgotten acts of individual defiance and protest of German and Austrian Jews in Nazi Germany. The soon to be published book will fundamentally revise our understanding of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Additional areas of research include the comparative history of mass violence and its resistance on a global scale, as well as racial and state discrimination against Indigenous and other minority populations, especially in Latin America. Since 2008, he is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at the University of Southern California. In 2014, Professor Gruner became the founding director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research (previously the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research). He is a member of the Academic Committee of the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and co-founder of the National Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies.
More information about Professor Gruner at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences