POSTPONED
Date:
March 7, 2013
Time:
1:50-3:15pm
Common Hour
Location:
D'Angelo Center 206
St. John's University Department of History,
the Women's and Gender Studies program, and the
World History Faculty Group
~ present ~
Dr. Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Cooper Union
Gender, the Holocaust, and its Aftermath: Old Questions, New
Research
Dr. Grossmann, a noted historian of Germany, German Jewry and
gender, will provide new insights into the gender dimension of the
Holocaust in this talk. Reflecting on the Holocaust through
the perspective of gender, does not, as many have worried, create a
troubling hierarchy of victimization but rather deepens our
understanding of experiences that are difficult to fathom. The
lecture examines commonalities and differences between female
and male experience in a variety of circumstances, including early
persecution, flight and emigration, life in the ghettos, the
ordeals of concentration and labor camps, the perils of hiding,
liberation, and the aftermath of the war.
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New
York City where she teaches Modern German and European History, and
Gender Studies. A graduate of the City College of New York (BA) and
Rutgers University (Ph.D.), she has held fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, German Marshall Fund,
American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Center
for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum and held Guest Professorships at the Humboldt
University Berlin and Schiller University Jena. Publications
include Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and
Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995), Wege in der Fremde:
Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und
Teheran (2012) and co-edited volumes on Crimes of War: Guilt
and Denial in the Twentieth Century (2002) and After the Nazi
Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe
(2009), as well as articles on gender and modernity in interwar
Germany, history and memory in postwar Germany, and gender and
human rights. Her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters
in Occupied Germany (2007, 2009, German edition, Wallstein, 2012)
was awarded the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical
Association (2007), the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from
the Wiener Library, London (2006), and listed as one of the five
best books of the year by the HSKult ListServ in 2008. Her current
research focuses on “Transnational Jewish Refugee Stories: Soviet
Central Asia, Iran, and India as Sites of Relief and Refuge for
European Jews during World War II.”