Reactions in Audiovisual Media

Chair: Michael Renov (University of Southern California, Cinema & Media Studies)

• Stephanie Seul (University of Bremen, Cultural Studies)
  “The Absence of Kristallnacht and its Aftermath in BBC German-language broadcasts during 1938-1939”

• Lawrence Baron (San Diego State University, Modern Jewish History)
  “Kristallnacht in Film: From Reportage to Reenactments, 1938-1988”

Stephanie Seul is a Lecturer in Media History at Deutsche Presseforschung, Department of Cultural Studies, University of Bremen. She studied History at LMU Munich and holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on British propaganda during the Second World War, on the German and international press during 1914-1945, and on media representations of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Her current project is entitled “German Antisemitism and the International Press during the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933.” Stephanie’s writing has appeared in numerous edited volumes and journals, including the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Jewish Historical Studies, Politics, Religion & Ideology, Media History, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Neue Politische Literatur, and Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte. Together with Nelson Ribeiro she edited a special issue of Media History (vol. 21,4 (2015)) entitled “Revisiting transnational broadcasting: The BBC’s foreign-language services during the Second World War.”

Professor Emeritus Lawrence Baron held the Nasatir Chair of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University from 1988 until 2012 and directed its Jewish Studies Program until 2006. He received his Ph.D. in modern European cultural and intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin where he studied with George L. Mosse.  He taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He has authored and edited four books including The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011) and Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005). He served as the historian and as an interviewer for Sam and Pearl Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe.  In 2006 he delivered the keynote address for Yad Vashem’s first conference devoted to Hollywood and the Holocaust.  His contribution to Holocaust Studies was profiled in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge: 2010).  In the fall Semester of 2015, he served as the Ida King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton University of New Jersey.