Holocaust Memory and After with Carolyn Dean

Join us to hear this compelling talk from Professor Carolyn Dean (Yale).

"Holocaust Memory and After: From Exemplary Victims to Global Genocides"

Critics have long bemoaned the paradigmatic status of the Holocaust of European Jewry, arguing that using the Holocaust as a standard of comparison erases differences between it and other violent events. This talk will address this criticism by discussing two interwar trials of Armenian and Jewish avengers of murder. It suggests that these trials mirror the historical conditions within which genocide became legible as an incomparable radical moral transgression that was eventually embodied by the experience of Holocaust survivors. It thus discusses the Holocaust as part of a longer cultural history of genocide that is ongoing and cannot be reduced to legal developments alone.

Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French at Yale University. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe and the author of several books on Holocaust memory, including most recently The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell, 2019).

Co-sponsored with the Department of History

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