Practical Details

• Teacher: prof.dr. Natalia Aleksiun
• Masterclass:
  • Monday 13 November 2023, 16.00-18.00 pm; 
  • Drift 23, 1.04 3512 BR Utrecht
  • Please register at bureau@onderzoekschoolpolitiekegeschiedenis.nl before 30 October 2023. There is a limit of 20 participants; RMA-students and PhD-students of OPG have priority.
• Lecture:
  • Tuesday 14 November 2023, 16.00-18.00 pm
  • Drift 21, 1.05 3512 BR Utrecht
  • Please register your attendance with Boris Wesseldijk, b.j.z.wesseldijk@uu.nl, by 10 November, 5pm.

Masterclass

In recent years, research into the microdynamics of violence has become increasingly popular. Whereas earlier work tends to concentrate on the macrolevel of violence, i.e. the decisions and worldviews of senior officials and policy makers, there is a distinctive trend in the scholarship toward the microlevel: the study of smaller communities and towns, groups, families, and individuals, including relations between neighbors, colleagues, friends, relatives and lovers. This trend transpires particularly in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Newer studies in this field draw attention to the huge impact of (sometimes pre-existing) local and communcal networks and dynamics on the way a genocidal process unfolded in a given community or town. It also underscores the effects of genocidal policies on individuals, their relations and communities. In recent years, scholarship on the micro-dynamics of violence has become increasingly popular. Zooming in on the microlevel allows us to engage with the ‘softer tissue’ of history: with the emotions and perceptions of both victims and perpetrators as well as their memory and silence.

In spite of the clear advantages of the shift towards microhistory, there are also challenges, particularly with regards to the sources. Evidently, going beyond institutional archives is needed for reconstructing these microhistories. It requires a turn towards diaries, private correspondence, as well as court testimonies and personal interviews which are often collected after the studied instance of mass violence. What are the specific pitfalls of working with these less conventional bodies of sources? Do they require any specific tools and skills? In this masterclass prof. dr. Natalia Aleksiun delves into her own research on the Holocaust in Poland/Ukraine to reflect upon the methodological and ethical concerns of microlevel research on mass violence.

Outline Masterclass 
16:00-16.10 Welcome
17.10-17:00 Presentation Natalia Aleksiun
17:00-17:10 Break
17.10-17:50 Laboratory: working with sources and student discussions
18:50-18:00 Conclusions and closing

Credit (1 EC) is optional. Requirement:
Writing a paper of 3000 words on central topic of the masterclass, to be submitted 1 week after the masterclass g.g.vonfrijtagdrabbekunzel@uu.nl

Lecture “Mass Violence and Victim Agency: Rescue Strategies of Jewish Physicians in Nazi Occupied Poland”

Where are the faces and experiences of victims of recent episodes of mass violence? How can we render their experiences visible and include them in historical accounts of conflict, violence and genocide? Come find out more and join us in the public lecture by a leading scholar, prof. dr. Natalia Aleksiun, jointly organized by the Political History Section of Utrecht University’s Department of History and Art History and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Drawing upon her own extensive research into Jewish – non-Jewish relations in Poland and Ukraine, Prof. Aleksiun will focus in her presentation on the relationships between Jewish physicians and their non-Jewish colleagues and patients, arguing for the centrality of professional networks and bonds of gratitude and self-interest in the rescue of Jewish physicians under the Nazi occupation.

About the speaker

Dr. Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida. She holds doctoral degrees from Warsaw University and New York University. She has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews and the Holocaust. In addition to her 2021 book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), which explores the role of academic and public history for shaping the collective identity of Polish Jewry after WWI, she is the author of Where to Next? The Zionist Movement in Poland 1944–1950 (Warsaw, 2002 [in Polish]) which delved into political culture among Polish Jewish survivors after the Holocaust. She studied the role of survivors as pioneer Holocaust historians, especially Philip Friedman, Artur Eisenbach, and Gershon Taffet. She edited Gershon Taffet’s Holocaust of the Jews in Zolkiew (Warsaw, 2019 [in Polish]). She has co-edited several volumes and special journal editions, including Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2023), Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust (2021), and Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (2017). She serves as editor of East European Jewish Affairs and is a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is completing a book on Jewish life in hiding in western Ukraine during the Holocaust and a book on the so-called cadaver affair in medical colleges in East Central Europe in the interwar period.