Spaces and Geographies of Concentration Camps
How to Preserve the Memory of Discrimination
Speakers:
Lisa Ackerman
Executive Vice President, World Monuments Fund
Remembering a Difficult Past
Alberto Giordano
Chair, Geography Dept., Texas State University
From the National to the Individual: Narratives of the Holocaust in Italy
Welcoming remarks:
Barbara Faedda
Associate Director, Italian Academy, Columbia University
Europe and the United Nations commemorate the victims of the Shoah each winter on the date of Auschwitz's liberation in 1945, and the Italian Academy marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with an annual academic event exploring issues of discrimination and crimes against humanity. In previous years, the Academy broadened its focus to explore groups that were targeted in the racism and xenophobia of the Nazi and Fascist regimes, and that suffered and died along with the millions of Jews. This year, the symposium will focus on the conservation and study of concentration camps in Italy.
About the Speakers:
Lisa Ackerman is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of World Monuments Fund, an international preservation organization that raises funds and provides expertise for heritage conservation projects throughout the world. Ms. Ackerman holds an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. Previously Ms. Ackerman served as Executive Vice President of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, a private foundation that provides funds for projects related to European art and architecture from antiquity through the early 19thcentury. Ms. Ackerman holds an MS degree in Historic Preservation from Pratt Institute, an MBA from New York University, and a BA from Middlebury College. Ms. Ackerman serves on the boards of Historic House Trust of New York City and the New York Preservation Archive Project. She previously served on the boards of the St. Ann Center for Restoration and the Arts, Partners for Sacred Places, US/ICOMOS, and the Neighborhood Preservation Center. In 2007 she received the Historic District Council's Landmarks Lion award. In 2008, Ms. Ackerman was named the first recipient of US/ICOMOS's Ann Webster Smith Award for International Heritage Achievement. She lectures frequently on cultural heritage, conservation, and philanthropy.
Alberto Giordano is a graduate of Geography programs at the University of Padua in Italy (BA), the University of California Santa Barbara (MA), and Syracuse University (PhD). Currently Mr. Giordano is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Texas State University and President Elect of UCGIS, the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. Mr. Giordano is also a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, a network of researchers and scholars interested in bringing geographical approaches, methods, and perspectives to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides. On this topic, Mr. Giordano has coauthored works on the geography of the Holocaust in Italy and in Budapest and on the Armenian genocide, with research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation, and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, among others. Currently, Mr. Giordano is working on a series of articles examining the social networks and personal narratives of the Holocaust in Italy and on a project to digitize the names and addresses of over 200,000 Holocaust survivors in Budapest. One topic that fascinates Mr. Giordano is how maps are used by victims and perpetrators of genocide, including questions related to propaganda and the construction of the "other." Mr. Giordano is also interested and involved in projects related to spatial applications to forensic anthropology, most recently on migrant deaths at the Arizona-Mexico and Texas-Mexico borders.
Image: The abandoned barracks at the Fossoli camp near Modena, 2012. (World Monuments Fund)
(Talks marked with an * appear in the Academy's 2016 book, Present and Future Memory: Holocaust Studies at the Italian Academy, 2008–2016)
2008 Law and Science in the Service of Racism: the “Leggi Razziali”
Speakers:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
New York University
The Italian Racial Laws: Pretexts, Subtexts, Aftermaths
Lidia Santarelli
New York University
The Righteous Enemy?
Fascist Italy and the Jews in Axis-Occupied Europe
Alexander Stille
Columbia University
The Holocaust and the Case of Italy
2009 Antisemitism at Home and Abroad
Speakers:
Ira Katznelson
Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University
The Liberal Alternative: Jews in the United States during the Decades of Italian Fascism *
Claudio Lomnitz [originally scheduled]
Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; Professor, Anthropology Department, Columbia University
Dreyfus in Latin America: Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution
2010 Rome’s Jewish Ghetto
Speakers:
Kenneth Stow
Professor of Jewish History Emeritus, University of Haifa
“Doing as the Romans Do” . . . But Also Staying Jewish.
The Challenge of Life in the Roman Ghetto, 1555–1870 *
Irina Oryshkevich
Society of Fellows, Columbia University
Accommodating the Jews in the “New Jerusalem” *
2011 “Racially Inferior”: Roma, Sinti, and Other Holocaust Victims
Speakers:
Krista Hegburg
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
“Unknown Holocaust”: Roma and Sinti in Hitler’s Europe
Robert Kushen
Executive Director, European Roma Rights Centre
Roma in Today’s Europe: Contemporary Patterns of Prejudice and Discrimination *
2012 “Unnatural Indecency”: Sexuality and Homosexuality during Nazism and Fascism
Speakers:
Ted Phillips
Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945 *
Elizabeth Leake
Department of Italian, Columbia University
Fascism and Sexuality in Italian Literature and Film
2013 “The Unfit”: Disability under Nazism and Fascism
Speakers:
Patricia Heberer Rice
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Giving a Face to Faceless Victims: Profiles of Disabled Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program *
Susan Bachrach
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race *
David Forgacs
New York University
Photographing Places of Social Exclusion
2014 Gender and Antisemitism: Women’s Rights Yesterday and Today
Speakers:
Victoria de Grazia
Columbia University
Fascist Men and Jewish Women
Yasmine Ergas
Columbia University
Women’s Rights and Women’s Freedoms: A View from the Present *
Elissa Bemporad
Queens College of the City University of New York
Female Voices of the Holocaust
2015 Music, Fascism, and the Holocaust
Speakers:
Michael Beckerman
New York University
Moravia and the Wild Goose: Terezin, Summer 1944
Harvey Sachs
Curtis Institute of Music
Jewish and Anti-Fascist Musicians in Mussolini’s Italy *
2016 To Be a Child during the Holocaust
Speakers:
Patricia Heberer Rice
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In Their Own Words: The World of the Child during the Holocaust *
Emily Langer
The Washington Post
“We Are Very Lucky”: Two Young Italian Sisters Who Survived Auschwitz
2017 Looted Art, Nazism, and Fascism
Speakers:
Monica Dugot
Senior Vice President/International Director of Restitution, Christie's;
formerly Deputy Director, Holocaust Claims Processing Office, NY State Banking Department
Jasmin Hartmann
Department for Provenance Research, City of Düsseldorf
"Non signalés par les Anglais." Provenance research on French drawings acquired in France in 1944
Ilaria Pavan
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; Italian Academy Fellow 2017
Jewish persecution and looted art in Italy: evidence and denial, 1938–2015
Moderator:
Lynn Rother
Senior Provenance Specialist, The Museum of Modern Art
2019 Antisemitism, Hate Speech, and Social Media
Speakers:
Susan McGregor
Assistant Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism; Assistant Professor, Columbia Journalism School
Memes, Misinformation, and Antisemitism: Coded Communications on Social Media
Michel Rosenfeld
University Professor of Law and Comparative Democracy & Justice; Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
Reassessing Antisemitism in an Age of Online Hate
2020 Misinformation, Media Manipulation, and Antisemitism
Speakers:
Ioana Literat
Assistant Professor of Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Youth political expression in online spaces”
Rachel Deblinger (via Skype)
Director of the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the UCLA Library;
Co-Director of the Digital Jewish Studies Initiative at UC Santa Cruz
“Remix, remember, retweet: meditations on Holocaust memory, social media, and antisemitism online”
Irene V. Pasquetto
Chief Editor, “HKS Misinformation Review,” Harvard Kennedy School
Costanza Sciubba Caniglia
Managing Editor, “HKS Misinformation Review,” Harvard Kennedy School
“De-platforming Neo-Nazis in Italy: impacts and unexpected consequences”
Alex Abdo
Litigation Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
“Free speech in black boxes”
2021 Liliana Segre on Auschwitz and What It Means Today
Interview with Barbara Faedda
2022 Emanuele Fiano on Activism against Oblivion
Interview with Barbara Faedda