Comparative Perspectives

Chair: Steve Ross (Director of the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, University of Southern California, History)

• Baijayanti Roy (University of Frankfurt, History)
  “The Long Shadow of Reichskristallnacht on the ‘Gujarat Pogrom’ in India: A Comparative Analysis”

• Nathalie Segeral (University of Hawaii-Manoa, French)
  “Reclaiming Kristallnacht: The Nazi Pogrom as Transnational Trope in Narratives of the Rwandan Genocide and the Migrants Crisis”

• Liat Steir-Livny (Sapir Academic College & The Open University, Israel, Cultural Studies)
  “The Contemporary Politics of Memory: ‘Kristallnacht in Tel-Aviv’”

Liat Steir-Livny is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture at Sapir Academic College, Israel. She also serves as a tutor and course coordinator in the MA program in Cultural Studies and in the Arts Department at the Open University, Israel. Her books and articles focus on Holocaust commemoration in Israel. Her first book, Two Faces in the Mirror (Eshkolot-Magness, 2009), analyzes the representation of Holocaust survivors in Israeli cinema, while her second book, Let the Memorial Hill Remember (Resling, 2014), analyzes the changing memory of the Holocaust in contemporary Israeli culture. Other works include Is It O.K to Laugh About It? (Vallentine Mitchell, 2017), which analyses Holocaust humor, satire and parody in Israeli culture, and Three Years, Two Perspectives, One Trauma (The Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, University of Haifa, In Print), which compares the films and newsletters of American Jewish organizations and Eretz-Israeli organizations in the peak years of the Zionist struggle for a Jewish State.

Nathalie Ségeral is an assistant professor of French and translation studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Her research, publications, and teaching revolve around memory and trauma studies, women’s and gender studies, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the French-speaking South Pacific. Her most recent publications include: a French translation of David Chappell’sLe Réveil kanak [The Kanak Awakening] (New Caledonia University Press, 2017), “(Re-)Inscribing the South Pacific in the Francophone World: (Non-)Motherhood, Gendered Violence, and Infanticide in Three Oceanian Women Writers” (SITES: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2018), and “(Re)Claiming Motherhood during and after the Holocaust in Chava Rosenfarb’s Little Red Bird and Valentine Goby’s Kinderzimmer” (Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, forthcomingJune 2019). In summer 2018, she will be a fellow at TOLI (The Olga Lengyel Institute) Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education and a fellow at the University of London’s Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization.

Baijayanti Roy is post-doctoral researcher at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Arbeitsgruppe Wissenschaftsgechichte or Study Group, History of Science), where she also received her Ph.D. Her current academic interest is to trace the connections between India, the country of her birth, and Germany, her country of residence. Her present research focuses primarily on the history of German Indology, from late 19th to the mid-20th century. Several of her forthcoming publications also relate to Nazi Germany, focusing on the trajectory of Indologist Heinrich Zimmer in the Third Reich, the dark attractions of Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s tea house and the state of knowledge about Holocaust in present-day India. Having worked as a journalist in India, Baijayanti remains a keen observer of Indian politics, particularly the politics of Hindu nationalism that holds sway over contemporary India. She has spoken in several international conferences and written articles in Indian newspapers on the influence of political Hinduism on particular Hindi (Bollywood) historical films.