A public lecture by Dorota Glowacka (Professor of Humanities, University of King's College, Halifax, Canada)
Center Visiting Scholar, April 2023
(Join us in person for this lecture or attend virtually on Zoom)

 

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

 

Depictions of women in Holocaust photographs were shaped by traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality. Whether in perpetrator photography, clandestine photographs from ghettos, or liberation photographs from camps, this visual repertoire has featured female bodies that conform to normative conceptions of gender. Gendered conventions have influenced the way images of women have been appropriated in practices of memorialization, as well as in Holocaust scholarship and pedagogy.

 

In this lecture, Professor Glowacka analyzes several photographs and discusses the ways cultural codes, gendered frameworks of meaning, and  aesthetic conceptions of female beauty contribute to which images circulate in postmemorial landscapes and which ones have been excluded from practices of memorialization. She reflects on whether these accustomed ways of seeing, shaped by gendered power relations, can be interrupted.

 

RSVP HERE

 

Dorota Glowacka is Professor of Humanities at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada, where she teaches critical theory, gender theory, and Holocaust and genocide studies. Glowacka is the author of Po tamtej stronie: świadectwo, afekt, wyobraźnia (From the Other Side: Testimony, Affect, Imagination, Warsaw, 2017) and Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Washington UP, 2012).

 

She is a member of the Academic Committee at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her current research focuses on gender and genocide, the intersections of the Holocaust and settler colonial genocides in North America, and the politics of translating Polish Holocaust diaries and memoirs into English.

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