Michael Rothberg | |
---|---|
Born | |
Spouse | Yasemin Yildiz |
Academic background | |
Education | B.A., 1988, English and Linguistics, Swarthmore College PhD., Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center |
Thesis | Documenting barbarism: memory, culture, and modernity after the "Final solution" (1995) |
Doctoral advisor | Nancy K. Miller |
Academic work | |
Discipline | English |
Sub-discipline | Holocaust |
Institutions | University of Miami University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of California,Los Angeles |
Main interests | Holocaust studies,trauma and memory studies,critical theory and cultural studies,postcolonial studies,and contemporary literatures |
Website | michaelrothberg |
Michael Rothberg is an American literature and memory studies scholar. He is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA). He was the founding director of the Initiative in Holocaust,Genocide,and Memory Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Rothberg was born to parents Sondra and Joseph alongside his sister Madeleine. [1]
In his first year at Swarthmore College,Rothberg discovered Literary Theory through reading Jonathan Culler's book Saussure. Rothberg stated this left a big impression on him and led him to read Jacques Derrida,Michel Foucault,and Jacques Lacan. While attending graduate school at Duke University,Rothberg studied with Fredric Jameson,among other people,around Marxist theory. After taking a few years off from school,he returned to his graduate studies,this time at CUNY Graduate Center. [2] Rothberg wrote his dissertation,"Documenting Barbarism:Memory,Culture and Modernity after the "Final Solution" in 1995 under the direction of Nancy K. Miller. [3]
Rothberg's interest in Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies began during his studies at CUNY Graduate Center. He was interested in investigating the relationship between Jewish American culture and African American culture. After reading Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic in the 1990s,Rothberg began constructing his first book,titled Traumatic Realism. [4] The book was published while Rothberg was an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Miami. [5] Traumatic Realism was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2000 and it used a multitude of writings to understanding different representations of the Holocaust. [6]
Following this,Rothberg earned a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2003 until 2009,he served as the Director of Illinois’s Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. [7] Beginning in 2009,Rothberg was Founding Director of the Initiative in Holocaust,Genocide,and Memory Studies at the university [8] and was given the honorific of Professor. [9] He also published Multidirectional Memory:Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization that same year. The book,published by the Stanford University Press,discussed how the memory of the Holocaust was reiterated in the articulation of other histories of victimization in the Caribbean,Africa,Europe,and the United States. [10] Two years later,in 2011,Rothberg,Yasemin Yildiz,and Andrés Nader earned a fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies. [11] In 2013,Rothberg was named Head of the Department of English [12] and his essay "Progress,Progression,Procession:William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice," was named the best of the year’s publications in the journal Narrative. [13] He was replaced as Head of the department by Vicki Mahaffey in 2016 [14] and accepted a position as the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California,Los Angeles. [15]
In 2019,Rothberg published The Implicated Subject:Beyond Victims and Perpetrators through the Stanford University Press. [16]
The following is a list of selected publications: [17]
Genocide denial is the attempt to deny or minimize the scale and severity of an instance of genocide. Denial is an integral part of genocide and includes the secret planning of genocide,propaganda while the genocide is going on,and destruction of evidence of mass killings. According to genocide researcher Gregory Stanton,denial "is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres".
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington,D.C.,the USHMM provides for the documentation,study,and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred,prevent genocide,promote human dignity,and strengthen democracy.
The Maafa,the African Holocaust,the Holocaust of Enslavement,or the Black Holocaust are political neologisms which have been popularized since 1988 and used to describe the history and ongoing effects of atrocities inflicted upon African people,particularly when committed by non-Africans which continues to the present day through imperialism,colonialism and other forms of oppression. For example,Maulana Karenga (2001) puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa,suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement:the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world,poisoning past,present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples".
RenéLemarchand is a French-American political scientist who is known for his research on ethnic conflict and genocide in Rwanda,Burundi and Darfur. Publishing in both English and French,he is particularly known for his work on the concept of clientelism. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida,and continues to write,teach internationally and consult. Since retiring he has worked for USAID out of Abidjan,Côte d'Ivoire as a Regional Consultant for West Africa in Governance and Democracy,and as Democracy and Governance advisor to USAID / Ghana.
Dominick LaCapra is an American-born historian of European intellectual history,best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University,where he is now a professor emeritus.
The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is an interdisciplinary program developed within the Graduate College and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It works to promote conversations among a range of departments in the humanities,social sciences,and performing arts by organizing lectures,panel discussions,and conferences,as well as a yearly series of lectures on Modern Critical Theory. The unit is one of several dozen centers around the world devoted to critical theory,and was one of the first to be formally established.
Holocaust studies,or sometimes Holocaust research,is a scholarly discipline that encompasses the historical research and study of the Holocaust. Institutions dedicated to Holocaust research investigate the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of Holocaust methodology,demography,sociology,and psychology. It also covers the study of Nazi Germany,World War II,Jewish history,religion,Christian-Jewish relations,Holocaust theology,ethics,social responsibility,and genocide on a global scale. Exploring trauma,memories,and testimonies of the experiences of Holocaust survivors,human rights,international relations,Jewish life,Judaism,and Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust world are also covered in this type of research.
The double genocide theory alleges that two genocides of equal severity occurred in Eastern Europe,that of the Holocaust against Jews perpetrated by the Nazis and an alleged second genocide that the Soviet Union committed against local populations in Eastern Europe. The theory first became popular in Post-Soviet Lithuania,in discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania. A more explicitly antisemitic version of the theory accuses Jews of complicity in Soviet repression and characterizes local participation in the Holocaust as retaliation,especially in Lithuania,eastern Poland,and northern Romania. Double genocide theory has been criticized by scholars as a form of Holocaust trivialization.
The assertion that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history was important to the historiography of the Holocaust,but it has come under increasing criticism in the twenty-first century. Related claims include the claim that the Holocaust is external to history,beyond human understanding,a civilizational rupture,and something that should not be compared to other historical events. Uniqueness approaches to the Holocaust also coincide with the view that antisemitism is not another form of racism and prejudice but is eternal and teleologically culminates in the Holocaust,a frame that is preferred by proponents of Zionist narratives.
Armenian genocide in culture includes the ways in which people have represented the Armenian genocide of 1915 in art,literature,music,and films. Furthermore,there are dozens of Armenian genocide memorials around the world. According to historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson,the Armenian genocide had reached an "iconic status" as "the apex of horrors conceivable" prior to World War II.
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York,after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide,especially in colonial contexts,as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Memory studies is an academic field studying the use of memory as a tool for remembering the past. It emerged as a new and different way for scholars to think about past events at the end of the 20th century. Memory is the past made present and is a contemporary phenomenon,something that,while concerned with the past,happens in the present;and second,that memory is a form of work,working through,labor,or action.
Doris Leanna Bergen is a Canadian academic and Holocaust historian. She is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto,the only endowed chair in Canada in Holocaust history. Bergen is also a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2018.
Sara Reva Horowitz is an American Holocaust literary scholar. She is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. She is also a member of the academic advisory board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ann Rigney is an Irish/Dutch cultural scholar and Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the transnational interaction between narrative and cultural memory and is authoritative in the field of Memory Studies.
Anton Weiss-Wendt is a Norwegian academic and historian. He has a PhD in Jewish history from Brandeis University and has worked at the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities since 2006.
"Never again" is a phrase or slogan which is associated with the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides. In the context of genocide,the slogan was used by liberated prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp to express anti-fascist sentiment. It was popularized by far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane in his 1971 eponymous book. The exact meaning of the phrase is debated,including whether it should be used as a particularistic command to avert a second Holocaust of Jews or whether it is a universalist injunction to prevent all forms of genocide.
The imperial boomerang or Foucault's boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.
The Catechism Debate,also known as Historikerstreit 2.0,is a debate about German Holocaust remembrance initiated by Australian historian A. Dirk Moses with his 2021 essay "The German Catechism". In the debate,Moses challenges the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In May through August of 2021,scholars reacted to Moses's thesis in the New Fascism Syllabus in a series of reflections curated by Jennifer V. Evans.
{{cite book}}
: |website=
ignored (help)