Professor Liliane Weissberg, German Dept. and Al Filreis, English Dept., Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing

All graduate students are welcome. This event grows out of concerns in the German department, and so may be most useful to students in related fields. Counts towards the CTL Teaching certificate. No registration necessary.

How does one teach the Holocaust? And how does one integrate a discussion about this historical event and its consequences into a Humanities curriculum? The present workshop will be led by Al Filreis, Professor of English and Director of the Writers House, and Liliane Weissberg, Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Al has taught courses on the reverberations of the Holocaust, an event that took place in Europe, on American fiction and has led workshops on the thought of Terrence des Pres and others who tried to conceptualize the Shoah and genocide in general. Liliane Weissberg has taught courses on psychoanalytic perspectives on trauma, and last semester, a course on witnessing and remembering the Holocaust.  Filreis and Weissberg will talk about their teaching experiences and reflect on primary source materials such as books, films, audio- and videotapes as well as  secondary works that were helpful in  structuring courses on this subject. Finally, they will touch on the issue of audience, as such courses often draw students whose families were directly affected by the Shoah.