Nadine Blumer is a 2013-2015 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. Sociology, University of Toronto). Her dissertation, From Victim Hierarchies to Memorial Networks: Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial to Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism examines how Romani Holocaust memory has both influenced and been influenced by memory of Jewish victimization in Germany’s historical narrative. At CEREV, Nadine will pursue the first comprehensive analysis of Canada’s newest federal cultural institution, in the project Virtual Multiculturalism: Curatorial Strategies and New Media at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. She will examine how CMHR practitioners negotiate among the different cultural groups vying for representation in the museum’s collection, in the context of Canadian discourses of multiculturalism and human rights and the growing importance of virtual technologies in museum praxis and the formation of cultural memory. Nadine has a chapter in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (Berghahn Books), the most comprehensive book to date on the experience and representation of European Roma under National Socialism, as well as an article in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on the relationship between cultural memory and the production of diasporic identity for Canadian Jewish youth.
Monica Eileen Patterson is a 2012-2014 Banting Postdoctoral Fellow who received her doctorate in Anthropology and History, and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. At CEREV, she is pursuing two projects based on her field and archival research in southern Africa: a monograph examining contested constructions of childhood in late apartheid South Africa, from 1976 to the early 1990s when negotiations for the transition to democracy began; and an experimental exhibit that allows former and current South African children to reflect on their experiences of childhood and explore the meanings of the apartheid past and its present-day legacies. Patterson is coeditor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places.She has also published in volumes including Encyclopedia of South Africa (2011),The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005), and Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics (2004). Monica is particularly interested in the intersections of memory, childhood, and violence in postcolonial Africa, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres. Visit Monica Patterson’s page at Academia.edu.
Jill Strauss PhD is the 2012-2013 Fulbright Research Chair in North American Society and Culture at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research involves Restorative Practices and the visual interpretation of narrative and difficult histories. She is also contributing to the Canadian War Museum’s exhibition, “Peace – The Exhibition” and training museum docents. In the US, Jill teaches in the Dispute Resolution Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Jill completed her PhD from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland in 2010 where she designed an innovative fieldwork project integrating storytelling and visual art for empathy and validation as one way to address a history of mutual humiliation and conflict with an intergenerational group of Catholics and Protestants. The artwork that came out of her doctoral fieldwork was exhibited several times both in Northern Ireland and in the United States. Jill has a Master of Education in Peace Education and Conflict Resolution from Teachers College Columbia University..
Amina Grunewald is a 2013 short-term research fellow at CEREV. She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of American and English Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she received an M.A. degree in English/American Studies, French Studies, and Educational Studies. Her current research focuses on contemporary Aboriginial cultural and decolonizing self-representations in contemporary literary and visual counter-narratives, and on contemporary dance/theatre/street performances and museum representations more generally. In 2012 Amina undertook research in Vancouver, B.C. on community-based self-representations of First Nations in co-curated museum and gallery spaces (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation). Amina’s fellowship at CEREV in February 2013 will focus on analyzing contemporary self-representations by various Aboriginal artists at the intersection of indigeneity and gender, with special emphasis on collective and individual memory work and strategies of recovery. She will also investigate curational practices that strive for the transferability of indigenous knowledge to non-native audiences. Amina’s stay at CEREV is co-funded by the Gesellschaft für Kanadastudien (Society for Canadian Studies) and Humboldt University’s English and American Institute.
Dr. Sharon Gubbay Helfer is an oral historian and a scholar-practitioner of difficult dialogues, affiliated as Research Associate with the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies. She recently completed a postdoctoral research project on pioneers of Jewish-Christian dialogue in Québec at the Université de Montréal, where she is a lecturer. As Research Associate with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia, she worked on the project “Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations” and created a pilot archive of Palestinian Canadian Life Stories. She is also a fellow of Concordia’s Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV). Her current projects include the creation of a pilot archive of Jewish Israeli Canadian Life Stories and the publication of a series of articles on interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Sharon was a CEREV Curatorial Fellow in the Winter of 2012.
Joseph Rosen’s work investigates the cultural production of memory in the context of contemporary sites of suffering and oppression. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow working with Erica Lehrer at CEREV. Rosen received a PhD in Social & Political Thought from York University. His dissertation, Beyond Memory: From Historical Violence to Political Alterity in Contemporary Space, develops a theory of working-through traumatic cultural memory and addresses mobilizations of Holocaust memory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rosen has written articles addressing: counter-monuments and non-memorials in Berlin; the ethics of memory in Emmanuel Levinas; Holocaust jokes; the poetics of Paul Celan & Mahmoud Darwish; and the false messianism of Shab’tai Tsvi. He has performed and published Jewish-Palestinian dialogues (with Hanadi Loubani) that address questions of memory and Diaspora in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Current research interests include: global memory discourses; comparative Holocaust memory; the role of ‘self-critique’ in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; curatorial frameworks for public memorialization of traumatic violence. Joseph was a Postdoctoral fellow from 2009-2011, funded by FQRSC.
Megha Sehdev is a PhD student in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has conducted research on domestic violence law in India, exploring its significance across NGOs, courts, and other institutions in New Delhi. Her dissertation research examines domestic violence through transnational networks of knowledge production. She tracks the links between legal developments in India, reports produced by human rights organizations, and decisions made on gender-based persecution claims in the Canadian refugee system. At CEREV Megha is examining how domestic space and temporality become accessible as forms of knowledge. Using notes, files, photos, and other media, she explores how redesigned documentary objects might serve as forms of spatial commentary. Prior to entering the anthropology program at Johns Hopkins, Megha completed a B.A. in South Asian Studies at UBC, and M.A. in Medical Anthropology at McGill. She has also pursued photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Megha was a CEREV Curatorial Fellow in the Winter of 2012.
Sima Aprahamian has been teaching at Concordia University since 1987. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Anthropology, granted at McGill University. Her current research project is entitled “Narratives of Displacement.” Her research interests include: cross-cultural gender and ethnic identities, community studies, gender/race/class/sexuality, women and development, social inequality, ideologies, literary criticism, the politics of representation, literary responses to genocide, genocide studies, theories of inclusion and exclusion. Her Doctoral Dissertation (based on fieldwork in the Beka’a valley of Lebanon, funded by SSHRC) was entitled The inhabitants of Haouch Moussa: From stratified society through classlessness to the re-appearance of classes. She is a member of MIGS (Montreal Institute of Human Rights and Genocide Studies), the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the American Anthropology Association, AES, CASCA, MESA, SSS. She has been organizing several panels in academic conferences over the years on literary responses to genocide, feminist perspectives on genocide, as well as publishing and presenting papers on identity issues, gender, genocide.
Max Bergholz is the James M. Stanford Professor of Genocide and Human Rights Studies in the Department of History at Concordia University. His research, which is based on archival documents and oral history interviews, focuses on the micro dynamics of mass violence and post-conflict remembrance in local communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia during and after the Second World War. His recent publications include “The Strange Silence: Explaining the Absence of Monuments for Muslim Civilians Killed in Bosnia during the Second World War,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer 2010), 408-434 and “When All Could No Longer Be Equal in Death: A Local Community’s Struggle to Remember Its Fallen Soldiers in the Shadow of Serbia’s Civil War, 1955-1956,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2008, (November 2010), 1-58. He is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled None of us Dared Say Anything: Mass Killing in a Bosnian Community during World War II and the Postwar Culture of Silence.
Annette Bhagwati studied Social Anthropology and Art History in Freiburg, Berlin and London. After extensive fieldwork in West Africa (Benin) she received an M.A. in Area Studies Africa (1993) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In her thesis she examined local aesthetics and evaluative frameworks in oral culture. After graduating, she worked for Artsworldwide, London, and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, before she became programme coordinator and in-house curator in the department of Exhibitions, Film, New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin (2001-2006). In this capacity, she coordinated and advised on major international exhibitions, conferences and festival collaborations, with a special focus on African, Asian and Latin American arts and cultures. Exhibitions include “Portrait Afrika. African Portrait Photography”, “The Short Century” (Okwui Enwezor), “subTerrain. Contemporary Art from India” (Geeta Kapur), “Politics of Fun. Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia” (Ong Keng Sen/Gridthiya Gaweewong), “Far Near Distance. Contemporary Positions of Iranian Artists” (Rose Issa), “DisOrientation. Contemporary Art from the Middle East” (Jack Persekian) and “About Beauty” (Wu Hung). Annette Bhagwati has taught graduate seminars on Classical and Contemporary African Art at Freie Universität, Berlin, as well as courses on the Exhibition history of non-Western art at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include transcultural curating, global art, African photography, South Asian and South-East Asian contemporary art.
Shelley Ruth Butler teaches at McGill University’s Institute for Canadian Studies. Her work focuses on museums and related sites of exhibition in diverse urban settings of inequality and social change. She is the author of Contested Representations: Re-visiting Into the Heart of Africa (1999 & 2008), an ethnography that examines the complexity of exhibiting African and colonial history in an establishment museum, the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto (ROM). She has also undertaken multi-sited, museum-centered research in post-apartheid South Africa, and done comparative work on urban space and alternative tourism in South Africa and Canada. Her current work examines progressive, constructive curatorial engagements in the contexts of township tours in South Africa as well as the “new” ROM.
Jennifer Carter is Professeure of Nouvelles muséologies, patrimoines immatériels et objets culturels in the Département d’histoire de l’art at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she teaches courses on the history and theory of museums. Prior to her appointment at UQÀM in 2011, Jennifer held the position of Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies program in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto since 2008. Jennifer conducts research in the areas of museology, representation, and architecture, and considers how these practices mediate, and are mediated by, the cultural institutions that frame them. A more recent research project takes up the emergent phenomenon of human rights museology. She has published essays in Museum Management and Curatorship (Forthcoming, May 2012); National Museums: New studies from around the world (Routledge, 2011); La revue de l’Association québécoise d’interprétation du patrimoine (Montréal, 2010); and Chora Five: Invervals in the philosophy of architecture (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007).
Karin Doerr teaches German culture, language and literature as well as women’s and genocide studies at Concordia, where she is an associate of the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. Her main focus is the impact of the Third Reich on language use. She has conducted interviews with Holocaust survivors and translated and edited their writings. Doerr has written and presented on literary responses to the Shoah, on antisemitism in German literature and on integrating the Holocaust into Germany’s university curriculum. She has collaborated with genocide specialist Kurt Jonassohn and co-authored Nazi Deutsch / Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of The Language of the Third Reich with American historian Robert Michel.
Steven High is Canada Research Chair in Public History at Concordia, codirector of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and principal investigator of a $1.2 million Community-University Research Alliance project entitled “Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations.” High teaches a course in which students examine practical and ethical dilemmas faced in oral history research. He also teaches the course “Memory and the Built Environment.” In addition to supervising a number of graduate students who specialize in public and oral history he will co-teach a Université de Montréal seminar during the coming academic year, focusing on life stories of war and genocide.
Heather Igloliorte joined Concordia’s Department of Art History as Assistant Professor of Aboriginal Art History in the fall of 2012. She recently authored an essay in Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011, Palgrave) about the exhibition she curated on behalf of the Legacy of Hope Foundation, “We Were So Far Away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools, based on the oral histories of eight Inuit former students of the residential school system. Other recent exhibitions include Decolonize Me (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2011); the online collaborative exhibition Inuit Art Alive; and the forthcoming Labrador Inuit Art Alive (2012), which will draw on oral histories, local archives, and community-based knowledge gathered during her dissertation research on the art history of the Labrador Inuit. Her teaching and research interests include the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, mid-century modernist primitivism, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resilience. She is the author of several articles related to this work such as the chapters in Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey (2009), Inuit Modern (2010), and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (forthcoming, 2012).
Zohar Kfir is a Montréal-based video artist working with experimental video, interactive art and installation. She holds a MFA from Concordia University’s Studio Arts Programme and a MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Zohar has shown her work internationally in galleries and at video festivals. Her artistic practice deploys non-linear narrative to cover a wide range of topics; from poetic meditations to documentary interventions. During 2013, Zohar received a Media Arts Canada Council for the Arts grant to develop her latest project, Shooting Back– an interactive web-‐based documentary art project, which explores life stories and events occurring in Palestine. The basis for this documentary project is video footage from B’Tselem’s video advocacy project, the Camera Distribution Project.
Martha Langford is an Associate Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Art History. Major works include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Image & Imagination (MQUP, 2005); and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (MQUP, 2007). An active independent curator, she was artistic director of the international biennale, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005. In curatorial partnership with Sherry Farrell Racette, Langford was a consultant for Photoquai. Biennale des images du monde 2009 at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and a curator of Unmasking: Arthur Renwick, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, 2009-10. Through research, teaching and graduate supervision, Langford joins interdisciplinary conversations about modes of consciousness materialized and sometimes provoked by photographic images, including representations of violence and sociopolitical taboos. Most recently, she has collaborated with John Langford on a study of amateur and popular photographies to consider personal and collective memories of the Cold War from a Canadian perspective. Their forthcoming book is A Cold War Tourist and His Camera (MQUP, 2011).
Loren Lerner is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at Concordia. She has curated exhibitions including Memories and Testimonies/Memoires et Témoignages (Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, April 2002, traveling exhibition) and Afterimage, an exploration of art works by Canadian women born near or after the end of World War II (Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre). Lerner’s publications include the edited volume Afterimage: Evocations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Canadian Arts and Littérature/Rémanences: Evocations de l’Holocauste dans les arts et littérature canadiens contemporains (Montreal: Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University, 2002), and journal articles including “Sam Borenstein, Artist and Dealer:The Polemics of Post-Holocaust Jewish Cultural Identity” (Canadian Jewish Studies/Etudes Juives Canadiennes 12, 2004) and “The Aron Museum at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in Montreal” (Material Culture Review/Revue de la Culture Matérielle 64, Fall 2004). Her recent course offerings include “Hate, Violence and Genocide in North American Art and Theory” and “Canadian Artists of Eastern European Origin from World War II to the Present”.
Krista Geneviève Lynes is a newly hired Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia. Her research examines the intersections of video art and documentary in making visible feminist political subjects, as well as multiple visions of social life under conditions of duress, political struggle, human rights abuse or super-exploitation. Her focus on the politics of visibility engages feminist and queer theories, questions of embodiment, gender and sexuality, postcolonial and transnational examinations of culture, questions of witnessing, spectatorship and encounter, psychoanalysis and semiotics. She is currently working on the aesthetics of ‘groundedness’ in representations of popular struggle and protest, as well as on panoramic visions in contemporary social landscape photography. Her manuscript, tentatively entitled Experimental Media, Transnational Circuits: Prismatic Visions and Feminism without Guarantees is forthcoming with Palgrave.
Cynthia E. Milton is Canada Research Chair in Latin American History and Associate Professor in the Département d’histoire at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007), editor of The Arts of Truth-telling in Post-Shining Path Peru (in progress), and co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005). Her most recent article is “Defacing memory: (un)tying Peru’s memory knots,” Memory Studies, 4:2 (2011): 190-205.
Julie Norman Julie M. Norman is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. She teaches courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Middle East foreign policy, and human rights. Julie is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: Civil Resistance (Routledge, 2010), and a co-editor of Nonviolence in the Second Intifada: Activism and Advocacy (Palgrave, 2011). She has also published on media activism, legal advocacy, and urban planning in the Middle East. Other research interests include international law, refugees, and prison/detention policies.
Matthew Penney is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Concordia. His research focus is popular culture in postwar Japan, particularly the ways in which various media have been used to represent Japan’s war experience. Penney has published a variety of articles including “‘War Fantasy’ and Reality: ‘War as Entertainment’ and Counter-narratives in Japanese Popular Culture” (Japanese Studies May, 2007) and “Far from Oblivion: The Nanking Massacre in Japanese Historical Writing for Children and Young Adults” (Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22(1), Spring 2008). His research highlights the efforts of Japanese creators to use popular culture to promote antiwar ideas.
Elena Razlogova is a cultural historian based in the History Department at Concordia who uses digital storytelling to encourage popular participation when interpreting and presenting the past. She codirects Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and directs the Digital History Lab. Projects at the lab use new media to share the tasks of historical research and interpretation with online audiences worldwide—scholars, students and the general public. Razlogova has collaborated on many web-based projects, most recently the online exhibit Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives and Vertov, a freeware media annotating plugin for the Firefox extension Zotero. Her research interests include the intersection of culture and political economy in modern American media history and the ethics of surveillance in the USA and Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Eric H. Reiter is Assistant Professor of Law and Society and Legal History in the History Department at Concordia. Among his research interests are conflict studies and the legal aspects of post-crisis reconstruction. Reiter teaches the course “Conflict and Its Resolution.” “Front-Line Justice” (Virginia Journal of International Law 46, 2006), an article he coauthored with Louise Otis, explores the role of mediation and other alternative dispute resolution techniques when rebuilding justice systems.
Ronald Rudin is a Trudeau Foundation Fellow and Professor of History at Concordia University. The author of six books and producer of two documentary films, he is a public historian who has long had an interest in how the larger population comes to understand the past. This focus is particularly evident in his book, Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey through Public Memory; the associated website; and the documentary film Life After Île Ste-Croix, made in conjunction with Leo Aristimuño and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada. He is also the producer of Remembering a Memory/Mémoire d’un souvenir, a documentary film that deals with the Celtic Cross on Grosse-Île and explores shifting memories in Quebec of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. This project, carried out in collaboration with Robert McMahon, is available online. Rudin’s continued interest in the public memory of Acadians is evident in his current research that sits at the intersection of public, cultural and environmental history by exploring both the history and memory of the establishment of Kouchibouguac National Park in New Brunswick, whose creation in 1969 led to the expropriation of over 1200 (mostly Acadian) families. This project has resulted in the creation of the website, Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park/Le retour des voix au parc national Kouchibouguac, which allows visitors to hear stories of former residents by way of 26 video portraits that are embedded in a map of the territory at the time of the expropriation. His book on the subject, Kouchbouguac: Removal, Resistance and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park, is forthcoming.
Anna Sheftel is an Assistant Professor of Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. She is currently researching how Holocaust survivors remember and recount publicly, as well as the personal, social and political context of that remembering. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled The Construction of Formal and Informal Historical Narratives of Violence in North-Western Bosnia, World War II Until Present, employs oral history and document-based research to understand how contemporary Bosnians negotiate their memories of war within the context local, ethnic and national narratives, all with their own politics. Her research interests include: post-communist memory, oral history, the politics of testimony, war tourism and narratives of atrocity. She has been involved in the CURA Life Stories project, based out of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University for almost 5 years, in the roles of administrator, interviewer, training and ethics coordinator, and researcher.
IN MEMORIAM.Roger I Simon was Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His research addressed questions of the pedagogical and ethical dimensions of practices of cultural memory particularly as this applied to the remembrance of mass systemic violence. Simon’s work on practices of remembrance and the development of historical consciousness was part of his continuing writing and research devoted to exploring the intersections of social and political theory, cultural practice, and the pedagogy of public history. Towards the end of his life, his writing projects included a consideration of the social and political implications of “remembering together” through social media, an elaboration of the force of an image in artwork intended as a practice of remembrance, a discussion of the development and design of the museum exhibition The Terrible Gift: Difficult Memories for the 21st Century, and the completion of the book length manuscript Undeserved Grace: Public Pedagogy, Museum Exhibitions and the Re-framing of Archival Photographs of Lynching in America. Simon was the author of The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning and Ethics (Palgrave MacMillian, 2005). His work appeared in the journals: Museum Management and Curatorship, Museum and Society, Memory Studies, The International Journal of Heritage Studies, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and Public: Art/Culture/ Ideas.
Stacey Zembrzycki is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University. A modern Canadian oral and public historian of ethnic and immigrant experience, she recently completed a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History at Concordia University, where she was also affiliated with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Zembrzycki’s first book, Baba and Me: Wrestling with Memories of Community, is forthcoming with the University of British Columbia Press. In addition to her website, her work on Sudbury’s Ukrainian community has been published in a number of collections and journals, including Labour/Le Travail and the Journal of Canadian Studies. Zembrzycki’s current research uses multiple, life story oral history interviews to understand the postwar narratives and educational activism of child Holocaust survivors in Montreal. This work has appeared in the Urban History Review and the Oral History Review.