Daniel Hershenzon Awarded Fellowship at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies
The Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages is very proud to announce that Daniel Hershenzon has been awarded a fellowship at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies for the academic year 2019-2020. This is one of the most prestigious fellowships in North America. Professor Hershenzon joined UConn in 2012 after having received his Ph.D. […]
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The Practical Side: Equipping Graduate Students for Jobs
The Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages welcomes a mix of Masters and Ph.D. students in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Comparative Literature (which includes a Chinese Studies Program). Graduate students in programs in the humanities are well aware that the employment landscape has shifted decisively in the past twenty to thirty years. This said, […]
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LCL Professor Shines Light on Massacre of Herero and Nama People
Katharina von Hammerstein, Professor of German Studies, and a member of UConn’s Human Rights Institute was interviewed by Courthouse News about a lawsuit being pursued at the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York against Germany. The lawsuit concerns the massacres of the Herero and Nama people in what is today Namibia (Africa) by German troops between 1904-1908. […]
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Spotlight: Jacqueline Loss
Dr. Jacqueline Loss, professor of Latin American Literary and Culture Students and the Director of Graduate Studies at LCL, is an internationally published researcher and educator. She is the author of two books, numerous articles and book chapters and is the coeditor of one collection of essays and another anthology of short stories. Her primary […]
[Read More]Upcoming Events
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10/18
The World in Classroom - Project based Learning for Cultural Understanding
The World in Classroom - Project based Learning for Cultural Understanding
Friday, October 18th, 2019
01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Storrs Campus Oak Hall 236
Speaker: Thorsten Wilhelm (Yale). The talk is in English. Refreshments will be served.
What you will learn:
- a cooking project for language learners' real world knowledge acquisition
- a telecollaborative project for mentally disabled learners
- the relationship between cultural and linguistic perceptions -
10/21
Lecture: "De las prolongaciones de lo humano: artefactos culturales y protocolos alternativos de la experiencia", by Luis Miguel Isava.
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10/25
Without Magic or Miracle: The 'Romance of Silence' and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness
Without Magic or Miracle: The 'Romance of Silence' and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness
Friday, October 25th, 2019
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Storrs Campus Oak 236
The Medieval Studies program welcomes Masha Raskolnikov (Cornell University) to speak on the prehistory of genderqueerness in the Old French 'Romance of Silence'. We encourage and welcome everyone to attend! -
10/29
America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe – Talk by Rebecca Erbelding
America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe – Talk by Rebecca Erbelding
Tuesday, October 29th, 2019
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Storrs Campus Class of '47 Room, Babbidge Library
"Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe" - Book presentation by Rebecca Erbelding, historian at Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The program is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served.
About the Book: America has long been criticized for refusing to give harbor to the Jews during World War II as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In her book Rescue Board, Rebecca Erbelding tells the extraordinary unknown story of the War Refugee Board, a US government effort late in the war to save the remaining Jews. In January 1944, a young Treasury Department lawyer named John Pehle went to a meeting with the president to argue for the relief funds needed to help Jews escape Nazi territory. Pehle prevailed, and within days, FDR created the War Refugee Board, empowering it to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution, and put Pehle in charge. Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. This is the story of how the War Refugee Board saved tens of thousands of lives.
About the Speaker: "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe" won the JDC-Herbert Katzki National Jewish Book Award in 2018. Erbelding holds a PhD in American History from George Mason University. She worked as an archivist and curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2003-2015, and since 2015, has been a historian for the Museum's newest exhibition, Americans and the Holocaust, which opened in April 2018. Her work has previously been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and on the History Channel and National Geographic.
The event is sponsored by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. -
11/6
Department Meeting
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11/7
Atina Grossmann on German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India
Atina Grossmann on German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India
Thursday, November 7th, 2019
12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Storrs Campus Dodd Center Konover Auditorium
Shelter from the Holocaust: German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India
Presentation by Dr. Atina Grossmann
About the Talk:
This lecture examines the intensely ambivalent and paradoxical experiences, sensibilities, and emotions of bourgeois Jews who found refuge in the “Orient” of India and Iran after 1933. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, these uprooted Jews navigated complex and unfamiliar terrain; homeless, stateless, having lost their livelihoods and professions, and with only an inchoate anxious sense of their families’ fate or what their future held, they were also oddly privileged as adventurous Europeans in exotic non-western, colonial or semi-colonial societies. On the margins of their collapsing and devastated Jewish European world, they lived as hybrids, themselves on the margins, emigré and refugee, caught uneasily, more or less comfortably, between colonizer and colonized. In flight from homelands that had condemned them as racially inferior, they carried with them a fraught sense of cultural superiority. Expelled from the “West” they never really left it behind, remaining, for variable but sometimes considerable lengths of time, in “global transit.”
Drawing on archival sources, memoirs and letters, fiction, and an extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia from both Iran and India (1935-1947), the talk probes refugees’ understanding of their own unstable position, the changing geopolitical situation, and their efforts to come to terms with emerging revelations about the destruction of European Jewry.
About the Speaker:
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City. She co-edited Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick). Further publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, German 2012), and Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (2012). Prof. Grossmann was a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University in the spring semester of 2015 and the Walter Benjamin Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2014.
The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
This program is held in remembrance of Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, and is made possible by the Center for Judaic Studies Frances and Irving Seliger Memorial Endowment Fund.
If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Pamela Weathers at 860-486-2271 or pamela.weathers@uconn.edu. -
12/4
Departmental Meeting
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2/5
Departmental Meeting
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2/26
Humanities Fellow Research Talk: Andrea Celli
Humanities Fellow Research Talk: Andrea Celli
Wednesday, February 26th, 2020
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Storrs Campus Humanities Institute Seminar Room, Babbidge Library 4th Floor
Our UCHI Fellow will be presenting their research talk on “Hagar the Outcast: Reappraisals of a Biblical Theme in the Context of Post-Tridentine Culture” followed by a light reception. For more information, please visit https://humanities.uconn.edu/fellowships/current-and-previous-fellows/. If you require accommodation for this event, please contact uchi@uconn.edu at least one week prior to the event. -
3/4
Departmental Meeting
Spotlight: Simone Puleo
Simone Maria Puleo is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies section of LCL. He is a native of Palermo, Sicily and moved to the United States when his parents decided to relocate their pastry business, living briefly in New York and Connecticut before settling in South Florida. Before coming to UConn […]
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