Placing Testimony:
A presentation by scholars from the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative

January 12, 2016 at 4:00 PM Pacific Time

A public presentation by Tim Cole (Bristol University), Alberto Giordano (Texas State University), Paul Jaskot (DePaul University), and Anne Knowles (University of Maine)
Holocaust Geographies Collaborative

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Cosponsored by the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program

The Holocaust Geographies Collaborative is a multi-institutional, collaborative nine-member research group. Four of its members — two geographers, one historian, and one art historian from different universities in the US and UK — spent a week at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research continuing their GIS research in which they use the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive testimonies to examine spaces and places of the Holocaust.

In this presentation, the four visiting members of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative will explain how they plan to use new methods of textual analysis to find traces of place and spatial experience in testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, in particular focusing on survivors’ experiences of work, movement, belonging, and alienation. The presenters will also discuss what the narrative structure of oral histories reveals about continuities and discontinuities in Holocaust memory and Holocaust experience.