The Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation will host in partnership with UNAOC Research Network partner Monash University’s History Program and the University of Warwick, the 3rd Dr. Jan Randa Conference in Holocaust and Genocide Studies Monash University, Melbourne, Australia 6-7 August 2013. The theme of the conference will be “Aftermath: Sites and Sources of History and Memory.”
Call for Papers: The field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is at a critical juncture. Archives, testimony projects, documentation centres, and emerging tools in the fields of salvaging and mapping sites of conflict have proliferated and thus present new possibilities for documenting and transmitting histories and memories of traumatic events. Consequently, the expansion of new sources (ranging from recently opened Holocaust archives to the creation of Rwandan testimony projects) and the unearthing of sites of destruction (in locations like Cambodia and Darfur) compel explorations of how evidence will be accessed and interpreted with an attention to their cultural, historical, topographical, and media specificity, and how they will be engaged not only in scholarly and pedagogical terms but also in larger areas of social and political practice.
This conference is situated within the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and so will address core conceptual and methodological questions concerning comparative approaches to genocide research using newly available sources and sites. That comparative stake is all the more important given that many recent and contemporary methods of documenting and analysing genocides, ranging from the Armenian and Cambodian contexts to the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, have often been circumscribed by historiographical and archival frameworks and practices shaped by the experiences and debates surrounding the Holocaust.
Abstracts Due: Abstracts are due Monday 4 March 2013 Please send all abstracts of paper or panel proposals by 4 March 2013 to the <aftermathATmonash.edu> address. More information on the ocnference is available at the website.