Exile and Archives in Literature and Music: Evening Reception and Conversation
Information
The workshop "Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present" explores new ways of thinking about archives, archival records, and other artifacts historians might use as primary sources to gain deeper insight into the history of migrants in transit and the knowledge they possessed, produced, transmitted, or lost. With a starting point in the history of Jewish migration from National Socialist-occupied areas, the workshop broadens out to investigate the experiences of refugees and migrants fleeing genocide, armed conflict, and persecution throughout the twentieth century. Specifically, it uses the idea of “lost knowledge” (Steinberg/Strobl) to ask how migrants who leave their homes try to convey both the sense of loss and the disorientation that accompany the navigation of new lived realities—from the geographical to the socio-cultural, political, and beyond—in correspondence or other materials that capture any aspect of their flight and migration.
The workshop is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; and the Wiener Holocaust Library, London. Partners of the event are USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research; Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles; Villa Aurora, Los Angeles; and Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
The full program of the closed workshop can be found here.
Participants
Julia Franck is an author based in Berlin, and a current Thomas Mann House Fellow 2024. She studied philosophy, modern German literature, and Ancient American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Frank published her first novel, Der Neue Koch, in 1997. Her work has received numerous prizes and awards, including a residency at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2005 and the German Book Prize in 2007. Franck also writes essays on literature, film, and art, and took the position of editor for Die Andere Bibliothek in 2023. Her work has been translated into 40 languages to date.
Andrea Orzoff is Associate Professor of History and Honors at New Mexico State University. Dr. Orzoff came to NMSU's History Department in 2002 after completing her undergraduate education at Northwestern University and her master's and Ph.D. at Stanford. Dr. Orzoff has written on European and global history, the politics of culture, the mass media, migration, and nationalism. She has won multiple prestigious fellowships to support her research, including several Fulbright awards. Dr. Orzoff teaches Honors courses on European cities, the legacy and memory of the Holocaust, migration and refugees, and many others.
Partners
This event is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; Wiener Holocaust Library, London & Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.