Date:
April 25, 2013
Time:
1:50-3:15pm
Location:
DAC 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.”