CfA: USHMM Faculty Seminar: Resistance to the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, and Beyond (Deadline March 15, 2026)

DC
United States

The 2026 Curt C. and Else Silberman Faculty Seminar explores resistance acts during the Holocaust with a focus on protest, hiding, and rescue. Together, we will examine the different forms of Jews’ resistance to Nazi antisemitic policies, as well as assistance that Jews and non-Jews (or “mixed” categories) provided to Jews, who found hiding places, lived under false identities, and escaped the Nazis during the Holocaust. In addition to discussing individual acts of resistance, we will investigate the ways in which Jewish and non-Jewish men and women were associated with or participated in resistance groups and networks. With the goal of teaching this content, we will consider why Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still often perceived as a rare occurrence, and how gender stereotypes led to a restricted or distorted view of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance. We will also examine the following topics:

• varieties of Jewish resistance, including hiding, passing, and escaping, etc.
• comparative research of rescue across Europe during the Holocaust
• the contexts and methods of Jews' and non-Jews' resistance
• the consequences and moral implications of rescue actions
• Jewish and non-Jewish forms of cooperation
• the politics of commemorating resisters and rescuers, etc.

The 2026 Silberman Seminar helps faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD students who are currently teaching or preparing to teach courses that focus on or have a curricular component related to the Holocaust. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to Anthropology, Archeology, Art, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, Human Rights, Migration Studies, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Psychology, Refugee Studies, Sociology, and Trauma and Memory Studies. The seminar aims to deepen, broaden, and enrich how we teach the Holocaust by drawing on a range of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to address different forms of Jews’ resistance to the Holocaust.

The deadline for applications is Sunday, March 15, 2026. This seminar will take place June 1–10, 2026 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Seminar applicants must be teaching or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America. The full CfA and the application form are available here on the USHMM website. Please contact Campus Outreach Programs (campusoutreachprograms@ushmm.org) with any questions. 

The Curt C. and Else Silberman Foundation endowed the Silberman Seminar for University Faculty in memory of Curt C. and Else Silberman. The Foundation supports programs in higher education that promote, protect, and strengthen Jewish values in democracy, human rights, ethical leadership, and cultural pluralism.

Contact Email

campusoutreach@ushmm.org

URL

https://www.ushmm.org/research/opportunities-for-academics/faculty-seminars/sil…

CfA: USHMM Faculty Seminar: Refugees and the Holocaust (June 5-13, 2024)

Link here: https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20026932/upcoming-deadline-cfa-ushmm-faculty-seminar-refugees-and-holocaust

What can we learn by examining the experiences of refugees who traveled in and beyond Europe during the Holocaust? How did one become a refugee? And what were some of their routes, places of transit, failed exits, as well as locations of temporary and permanent refuge? The 2024 Silberman Faculty Seminar focuses on teaching topics relating to refugees and the Holocaust from a range of interdisciplinary approaches—including but not limited to perspectives from literature, art, history, migration, human rights, and memory studies. Together, we will make connections between local and global histories of the Holocaust, as well as reflect on ideas of displacement within the broader frameworks of the nation-state and empire.

The Silberman Seminar will take place from June 5-13, 2024 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Seminar is designed to help faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD students who are currently teaching or preparing to teach courses that focus on or have a curricular component related to the Holocaust and/or refugee and migration studies. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to Anthropology, Archeology, Art, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, Law and Human Rights, Migration Studies, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Psychology, Refugee Studies, Sociology, and Trauma and Memory Studies. The Seminar aims to deepen, broaden, and enrich how we teach about refugee experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust across a range of disciplines and fields.

Applications must be received electronically by March 15, 2024. The full CfA and the application form are available on the USHMM website: https://www.ushmm.org/research/opportunities-for-academics/faculty-seminars/silberman/2024.

Seminar Facilitators

Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History Emerita, New York University

Tabea Alexa Linhard, Director and Professor of Global Studies, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis

CFP: Comparative Slavic, ACLA 2023 seminar

Deadline: October 31, 2022

ACLA 2023 seminar: Comparative Slavic

Historically, the philological traditions of Slavic Studies have proven somewhat resistant to comparativist inquiry. Yet Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, as well as a long overdue reckoning with the question of race in research and professional practices, have brought into focus the urgent imperative to decolonize and diversify the scope of Slavic Studies. What tools from Comparative Literature might help to fuel this revision?

This seminar aims to bridge the banks of Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies. It invites papers from scholars writing for audiences in both fields and hopes to provide a space for productive conversations about their respective disciplinary expectations, conventions, and trends, while also forging paths for new directions. We welcome papers that explicitly address these questions of disciplinarity, as well as those drawn from exemplary research that straddles the Slavic/Comp Lit divide and that blend a commitment to philological precision with comparative theoretical inquiry. We also especially welcome contributions from graduate students who are expecting to go on the job market in both Comparative Literature and Slavic, as the stream will aim to provide a space to think through strategies for reaching these different audiences.

Possible contributions include, but are not limited to:

• Papers that employ the tools of one field on the archives of the other; for example, applications of theoretical concepts seemingly the preserve of specialized Slavic study in a comparative context, or of those that originated in Comparative Literature contexts in a Slavic studies context.
• Papers that focus on comparison between so-called “minor” and “major” Slavic languages: how does that comparison function “within” Slavic studies?  
• Consideration of topics in postcolonial theory or critical race theory applied to the territories of the former Eastern Bloc or Yugoslavia
• Papers that critically engage with the discursive histories of either Slavic Studies or Comparative Literature in Eastern Europe. Potential topics could include:
  
  • the comparative historical development of the discipline of Slavic Studies in both Slavic and non-Slavic countries
  • the development of Comparative Literature studies within the countries of Eastern Europe
  • the role that Title VI, Title VIII, and other federal funding has played in shaping U.S. Slavic Studies
  • challenges arising from the fact that the anglophone scholarly discourse colloquially named “Slavic Studies” has historically also housed the study of Eastern European and Eurasian literatures that don’t identify as Slavic
  • how certain scholarly trends have shaped the representation of Eastern European literatures in anglophone scholarship (for instance, the disproportionate focus on South Slavic folklore as opposed to other literary forms; or the historically attenuated relationship of Slavic Studies to gender and queer theory) 

Event: Expert Panel and Seminar: "Epidemics and Nation-Building in Interwar East Central Europe" 17 April 2021

The expert panel and seminar "Epidemics and Nation-Building in Interwar East Central Europe" takes place on April 17, 2021 at Central European University in Vienna. The event takes place online.

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a quest for historical parallels that help us contextualize this traumatic event. The voices of historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science are vital in this debate. The event, consisting of an expert panel and a seminar, focuses on the experience of interwar East Central Europe to explore these historical parallels.

---

Expert panel (11:00-13:00)

The expert panel brings together scholars working on various contexts and issues connected to biopolitics in East Central Europe. Their presentations will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Professor Jakob Vogel of the Centre Marc Bloch and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

The program of the presentations is as follows:

Ana Cergol Paradiž (Ljubljana): Psychiatry and Biopolitics in Slovenia

Călin Cotoi (Bucharest): Cholera and Nation-Building in XIXth Century Romania

Friederike Kind-Kovacs (Dresden): Rescuing the Future of the Nation: Childhood, Hunger and the Spanish Flu in Budapest after the Great War

Martin Kuhar (Zagreb): Social Diseases, Social Therapy: Public Health and National Regeneration in Interwar Yugoslavia

Victoria Shmidt (Graz): Health Films for Interwar “Periphery”: Between Adapting the Global Order and Building National Authenticity

---

Seminar (15:00-17:00)

Based on the proposed list of readings, seminar discussion will explore the following topics:

1.       Epidemics and nation-building

After the collapse of the continental empires in the aftermath of the Great War, East Central Europe faced a double challenge of taming epidemics and nation-building. There is an emerging body of literature that discusses the process of post-imperial transitions in East Central Europe and the continuities between the interwar states and the continental empires that preceded them. Through the prism of epidemics control, we will explore whether and how biopolitical issues fit into these narratives. Drawing on the concept of biopolitics, our seminar will thus rethink some aspects of the process of nation-building in the region.

2.       Expertise and its credibility

Sociologists and historians of science have long discussed various forms of expertise, and studied the strategies that helped them gain credibility. Drawing on these debates, we will explore the production and uses of biopolitical knowledge in interwar East Central Europe. Who claimed expertise on biopolitical issues, and on what grounds? What audiences they sought to address? Finally, how did they win – or fail to win – trust in polarized societies?

3.       Epidemics in the margins

Interwar East-Central Europe was a diverse space. Its multiethnic and yet nationalizing states pursued policies that sought to render their populace legible. Our seminar, therefore, will discuss what impact these policies had on the internal peripheries of these states. How did they represent the ethnocultural diversity of these spaces, and various racial, gender and class identities? How were these policies negotiated on the ground? Did they interact with other, local forms of knowledge, or did they marginalize it? How did these policies shape subjectivities in these areas?

4.       Global entanglements

Recently, historians in East-Central Europe turned towards the global, and started exploring imperial and colonial entanglements of their region. Drawing on this fascinating research, we discuss how the concept of circulation of knowledge complicates the narrative about biopolitics in interwar East-Central Europe. What transnational, (post-)imperial, and colonial knowledge about diseases and their control circulated in the region, and how was it appropriated? Who were the key transnational actors that facilitated the move of ideas, practices and people? What role did East Central Europe play in shaping discourses and practices on biopolitics on a global scale?

The event is organized by the research network “Intellectual History in East Central Europe,” a collective of advanced doctoral students at Central European University and partner institutions. The network promotes in the ECE area the research on intellectual history that goes beyond national canons. 

For the research network,
Lucija Balikić
Vojtěch Pojar

Contact Info: 

Lucija Balikić, Vojtěch Pojar
Department of History, Central European University, Budapest/Vienna

Contact Email: intellectualhistoryece@gmail.com

URL: https://intellectualhistoryece.wordpress.com/

CFA: Between Enemy Combatant and Racial ‘Other’: Nazi Persecution of Soviet POWs

Deadline: November 1, 2019


The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's application for their 2020 Hess Seminar, Between Enemy Combatant and Racial ‘Other’: Nazi Persecution of Soviet POWs is now live. This year’s Seminar will explore Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) as one of the many victim groups that the Nazis deliberately persecuted in their campaign on the Eastern Front. For the full Call for Applications and application link, please visit our website. The seminar will take place from January 6-10, 2020, and applications are due on November 1, 2019.