ENGL 7239 Holocaust and Gender was the first offering of a graduate level, special topics class in Rhetoric and Composition in the newly merged English Department Masters Program.
The class explored the interdisciplinary nature of the Holocaust with a focus on the rhetoric of public memory through the lens of gender. We read Holocaust memoirs, Holocaust poetry, and Holocaust comix (you can find our reading list below). We also spent a large portion of the class looking at rhetorical public memory practices in national Holocaust Museums, examining the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin Germany. This course included field study in Washington DC and an online tour of the Berlin memorial.
This exhibit constitutes the public research that resulted from these graduate students’ field experience, primary data gathering at the museum sites, and deep, topic research. The students curated the exhibit you see here to explore gender, broadly conceived, in two national Holocaust Museums. In order to build this narrative, students used both their field study and our readings on public memory, gender, and the Holocaust. As rhetoricians, they placed their experiences in the museums at the center of their research in order to discern and analyze what they saw, what it meant, and what they wanted to tell their audience at home.
What they discovered in the process of building this exhibit was a fascinating narrative of gendered memory and the Holocaust that only became evident through the myriad of stories, artifacts, and histories they encountered at the museums and in their extended research process. They found that the gender focus exposed stories of incredible bravery and resilience from voices we may not hear as often–those of women and children. This exhibit explores a broad range of topics: children’s survival, artwork in the camps, images of women, women in resistance, heroic women, propaganda, and the dynamics of space. The guiding thread for the narrative is that gender made experiences of the Holocaust, in some cases, very unique. This gender focus enables a fuller history to be told.
This public research project, including the the Bearing Witness Library Exhibit and field study, was funded by a matching grant from the German Embassy’s Germany on Campus Program with support from Georgia Southern’s College of Arts and Humanities, the Department of English, the Office of Sponsored Research and Programs, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
We are indebted to our campus partners at the Henderson and Lane Libraries, as well as the Director and staff at the Georgia Southern Museum, for making this project possible. We could not have done it without you.