CFP: Space in Holocaust Memory and Representation

Conference
Institute of Humanities, University of Northumbria, UK
19-21 November 2021
Stichtag: 2021 05 31

We invite papers on any aspect of space, landscape and location in Holocaust representation, including literature, film, art, maps, photography, museums and other media, as well as the kinds of methodology suitable for analysing such phenomena.

While spatial analysis of this kind has characterized recent work by historians and geographers, who use techniques of mapping and geo-visualization (as for instance in the volume Geographies of the Holocaust, eds Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Albert Giordano), there has been less work on cultural examples of space and Holocaust memory. This conference therefore aims to explore the importance of the spatial aspects of the Holocaust years, and their implication in the commission and remembrance of the crime, as evident in artistic and figurative expression, conceived in its broadest sense.

We therefore invite papers on any relevant topic, where space is integral to the representation of Holocaust memory, even – or especially – in cases where such spatial imagery might seem only to be implicit or act as a backdrop. Topics or areas of interest might include, but are not limited to, consideration of such features as:

Location film footage, testimonial recall, visual and metaphorical symbolism, graphics and comics, social media, reconstruction, fantasy and escapism, journeys, linguistic or geographical displacement, theatrical spaces, sculpture, memorials, repurposed sites and buildings, layered and palimpsestic images, ecology and the natural world, the work of spatial theorists and the Holocaust.

Abstracts should be up to 250 words with an author biography of up to 100 words. Please send them, or any queries, to ad.holocaust.memory.and.representation@northumbria.ac.uk by
31 May 2021.

Keynote speakers: Professor Karen Frostig (Lesley University, USA); Professor Roma Sendyka (Jagiellonian University, Poland)

Organising committee: Emily-Rose Baker, Michael Holden, Diane Otosaka, Sue Vice, Dominic Williams