The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) was founded in 2009 by Michael Rothberg and a group of scholars including Peter Fritzsche, Anke Pinkert, and Brett Ashley Kaplan. The idea was to bring together research across the University of Illinois campus in comparative genocide issues. Since 2016, Brett Kaplan has directed the program. The current HGMS affiliated faculty work on questions of trauma and memory in the contexts of the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, and other geographic and historical sites. We host a vibrant HGMS faculty series that offered an opportunity for UIUC scholars and guest visiting scholars such as Ariella Azoulay to share ideas across the range of disciplinary, theoretical, geographical, and historical span of memory studies. Each spring we host two major events: an interdisciplinary graduate student conference for UIUC and UCLA graduate students, and an event that discusses some aspect of Armenian culture, history, literature, art on or around the annual commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, April 24th. HGMS maintains an active blog entitled (after the brilliant Holocaust survivor and writer Charlotte Delbo’s work) Days and Memory. HGMS has become a vibrant center of intellectual exchange on this campus and connects with many memory scholars around the world.
See what students and faculty have to say about HGMS.
HGMS is profoundly committed to fostering graduate student education and to that end we have several projects ongoing. We organize many events to benefit the campus and off-campus communities; we have been able to produce a huge number of wonderful conferences, lectures, roundtables etc. on either a shoestring budget or with funds raised externally.
A wonderful Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group organized by HGMS students fosters intellectual exchange between students and faculty from English, Comparative Literature, French, Art History, Library Sciences, German, and other programs and departments.
HGMS is affiliated with Mnemonics, an international summer school that holds a scintillating annual conference. Each year we send one HGMS student to the conference. We hosted the Mnemonics summer school in the summer of 2016 and it was thrilling to welcome graduate students and faculty from all over the world to discuss ideas at the cutting edge of memory studies.
Related Items
“Arts of the Border: Kino-Aesthetics and the Movement of Refugees” The keynote lecture for the Race, Migration, and Memory Conference (Keynote Lecture: Nov. 2, 2023, 5pm, Levis Faculty Center 210…
On Friday, November 3, 2023, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies held a conference on Race, Migration, and Memory. Keynote speaker Shimon Attie talked about "Night Watch and Other…
The Program in Jewish Culture and Society-affiliated faculty member Brett Kaplan held a screening of the remarkable film No. 4 Street of Our Lady with special guest producer and director Judy Maltz…
The Program in Jewish Culture and Society-affiliated faculty member Brett Kaplan spoke at an event to mark the launch of her new book Rare Stuff on October 27th. The talk took place at the Author's…
Yossi Klein Halevi and Mohammad Darawshe, two internationally-recognized thinkers on navigating the deeply-held divisions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will speak during a live Zoom event…
The Association for Jewish Studies held their Annual Meeting this year in sunny San Diego, California from December 15-17. Many University of Illinois faculty members and graduate students were in…
The 2019-2020 annual newsletter is now complete! The newsletter can be viewed or downloaded by clicking on 2019-2020 in Electronic Newsletters under Resources. Enjoy, and let us know if you have any…
Helen presented Materiality and "Memory in the Margins: Kevork Mourad’s 'Strata of Memory' and Nancy Kricorian’s Palimpsest Poems and Vignettes" at the Graduate Student Workshop in Armenian Studies…
The series that has become “Mad Creative” is the first in what I hope will become an HGMS annual tradition. It generated through a perhaps atypical origin story. I saw on Facebook a posting from one…
The Fred S. Bailey Fellowship for Community Leadership, Service, and Activism supports University of Illinois Urbana campus graduate and professional students who have shown passion, creativity,…
We are delighted that three affiliated faculty of the Program in Jewish Culture & Society or the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies are included in the newest news from LAS!…
I created Dialogue: A Polish-Jewish Film Series about a year ago with the intention of starting a forum for cross-cultural dialogue around Polish-Jewish issues that extend well beyond the scope of…
On Monday, November 6, 2017, with generous support from the Greenfield Lynch lecture series, we hosted a panel about James Friedman’s striking series, “12 Nazi Concentration Camps.” The panel…
The Program in Jewish Culture and Society and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies organized a special visit from Peter Balakian, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning Armenian American…
The Krouse Family Visiting Scholars in Judaism and Western Culture Fund made another exciting visit possible this year. Dagmar Herzog a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and her…
